In the end, Ducks general manager Bob Murray didn’t trade longtime captain Ryan Getzlaf. He also didn’t deal Josh Manson or Ryan Miller or Rickard Rakell or any of the other players who were rumored to be on the move before the NHL deadline came and went Monday.
Getzlaf agreed to waive his no-movement clause to facilitate a trade.
But trading partners wouldn’t meet Murray’s asking price for Getzlaf, especially after the Buffalo Sabres settled for Anders Bjork and a second-round draft pick in return for former league MVP Taylor Hall and Curtis Lazar in a swap with the Boston Bruins one day before the deadline.
“I had a specific goal in mind, and I told ‘Getzy’ this, of what I needed to get so I could go to him and say, ‘OK, this would work,’” Murray said. “We talked a lot. He’s all about the organization. I can’t get into specifics, but I had goals in mind for what I was trying to do here, and it didn’t come to fruition.”
So, instead of selling, Murray went into buying mode, acquiring defenseman Haydn Fleury from the Carolina Hurricanes, a player he had coveted since first scouting him as a 16-year-old, when he made his debut with the Red Deer (Alberta) Rebels of the Western Hockey League.
Murray sent defenseman Jani Hakanpaa, 29, and a sixth-round draft pick in 2022 to Carolina to get Fleury, 24, who has one goal and a minus-6 defensive rating in 35 games this season. In a separate deal, Murray flipped defenseman Ben Hutton, 27, to the Toronto Maple Leafs for a fifth-round pick in 2022.
“He’s a big kid, skates very well,” Murray said of Fleury, who is listed at 6-foot-4 and 216 pounds and is signed through next season at $1.3 million “He’s been kind of stuck in Carolina a little bit behind a really good, solid defense and hasn’t been given really good opportunities.
“I think this is a great opportunity for him and for us.”
Fleury was the seventh overall pick in the 2014 draft, going to the Hurricanes three slots before the Ducks selected left wing Nick Ritchie with the 10th pick. Fleury made his NHL debut in 2017-18, playing a career-high 67 games and recording eight points, all assists.
Overall, he has five goals and 19 assists in 167 games over four NHL seasons.
“We’ve come close, Donny Waddell and I, to this sort of thing a few times,” Murray said of previous negotiations with his Carolina counterpart for Fleury. “We’ve had a few talks. Yes, this is part of adding to the future. We’re definitely going in the right direction with the younger guys.
“We’re going to get another good draft pick this year to add to the ones we’ve had the last few years. Making deals for draft picks who aren’t first-rounders doesn’t make a lot of sense for us right now. My goal is to get players who have already been drafted and have a little bit of experience already.”
Murray referred to first-round picks Jamie Drysdale (sixth overall) and Jacob Perreault (27th) last year and Trevor Zegras (ninth) and Brayden Tracey (29th) in 2019. Drysdale and Zegras made their Ducks debuts earlier this season. Perreault and Tracey have played in the AHL with the San Diego Gulls.
So, with teams unwilling to swap a first-round pick for Getzlaf, Murray moved in another direction, one he started when he acquired forward Alexander Volkov from the Tampa Bay Lightning in exchange for minor leaguer Antoine Morand and a seventh-round pick in 2023 on March 24.
“We’ve had numerous discussions about his future, and to his credit, most of them were about the future of this organization,” Murray said of the 35-year-old Getzlaf, who will be a free agent at season’s end. “As he told me eight years ago when he signed his contract, if I thought he could help us by moving his contract somewhere else he would have done it. We narrowed it down and talked. It just wasn’t there.”
