Bill Armstrong recapped all of the Coyotes' trade deadline moves and talked about his vision for the team's future.
The Arizona Coyotes had a bit of an underwhelming trade deadline.
On Thursday, general manager Bill Armstrong dealt Troy Stecher and a 2024 seventh-round pick to the Edmonton Oilers for a 2027 fourth-round pick.
On the day of the trade deadline, the Coyotes moved Jason Zucker to the Nashville Predators for a 2024 sixth-round pick as well as sending Matt Dumba and 2025 seventh-round pick to the Tampa Bay Lightning for a 2027 fifth-round pick.
The value that the Coyotes got for these players was not overly high at all, but Armstrong did what he needed to do.
“Every year is a little bit different. Obviously at this point in the season as a team you always want to be adding,” Armstrong said. “I’m a little bit disappointed in the fact that we weren’t able to do that. We had to go the other way at the deadline, but I thought we did a good job, we got some players on their way. The great thing we did in the summer is not get locked into long term deals, allowing this young team to grow and breathe…
“It was an important deadline for us in the sense that we were able to accomplish what we set out to do and I think there was a transparency with the players that if it wasn’t going our way going into the playoffs that we were going to move bodies.”
Stecher, Zucker and Dumba were all on expiring contracts, so it made sense to move them in order to get some sort of value before they become free agents in the summer.
A big thing to note in all of these trades is that most of the draft picks Arizona acquired are all years down the road which was intentional on Armstrong’s part.
“Our intention is to use them down the road when we become a better team than we are now,” Armstrong said. “Hopefully at the deadline at some point in time, use those and hopefully add pieces, so it’s always nice to have and you can never think about far enough into the future. It gives us power and we have always tried to use our picks to buy players or to draft players. If you look at all the teams that have won the Stanley Cup, their top guys are drafted, so we will keep going at the draft.”
Despite the playoffs basically being a pipe dream for the Coyotes at this point, Armstrong is still looking to see progress and a winning brand of hockey from his team.
“We are looking for the team to grow and even get better… We want our guys to grow through this process and even get better,” Armstrong said. “We went through some tough times this year and I know it left some scars, but I don’t mind some of those scars for a reminder of how hard we need to work and what it takes to win, so I’d like to see our guys pay that price to walk on that winning side and lets see us move forward.”