Arthur Staple was all over the Islanders’ late-camp revamp of their defense corps today. The Big Club traded from numbers back there and from draft picks to acquire Johnny Boychuk from the cap-pressured Bruins for two second-round draft picks and a conditional third-rounder, then Nick Leddy and goalie Kent Simpson from cap-squeezed Chicago for prospect Ville Pokka, freshly signed T.J. Brennan and the rights to Anders Nilsson.
Seems at first blush like two good old-fashioned Good Trades For Both Teams. The Isles add the two most-rumored defensemen on the cap-affected market. They give up assets, but from strengths: They had numbers on defense. They have numbers of young defensemen, and while Pokka’s got potential, they’ve got a volume of young defensemen all turning pro right about now. And they had cap space. That gives the Bruins and Blackhawks good returns for those guys.
That puts the Islanders at 49 NHL contracts, one under the limit. They’ve got 51 players signed after agreeing to terms with Joshua Ho-Sang, but Ho-Sang and Dal Colle were sent back to junior today.
The Big Club’s defense briefly included two of the past six Eddie Shore Award winners as AHL defensemen of the year: Boychuk with Providence in 2008-09, and T.J. Brennan last year in Toronto. Guess you can only carry one at a time.
Simpson, a second-round pick in 2010, played last year for Rockford to a .891 save percentage. He’s in the third year of his ELC. Destination undetermined at the moment.
—Edit: Just clicked the “show trades” button on Simpson’s IHDB page. The pick the Blackhawks used to take him was traded three times before they got to use it. It went from San Jose to Ottawa, then to the Islanders for Andy Sutton shortly before he became a YouTube “expert” sensation, then to Chicago, finally, in the deal that moved the Islanders into the 30th pick. They took Brock Nelson.