Former goalie Curtis McElhinney shares experiences with trade deadline

There are now two weeks and counting until the 2022 NHL trade deadline.

It’s a juncture where it’s sometimes hard to gain perspective with the rumors and the excitement building in many markets over the players that may be available to teams with Stanley Cup aspirations.

It’s easy to lose sight of what it means to the players in those dressing rooms around the NHL as the hours tick away to the deadline. We were reminded of this perspective when we saw a video recently of long-time NHL netminder Curtis McElhinney receiving his second Stanley Cup ring from the Tampa Bay Lightning when the Lightning were in Denver to play the Avalanche.

McElhinney, who retired last fall after 13 seasons, saw first-hand how the Lightning managed the trade deadline in assembling a roster that won back-to-back Cups in 2020 and 2021 in spite of significant salary-cap restrictions. More importantly, as it relates to perspective at this time of the NHL season, McElhinney was involved in four transactions during the trade-deadline period in his career.

In short, Curtis McElhinney knows the trade deadline.

The 38-year-old is enjoying his first season away from pro hockey in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where he lives with wife Ashley and a son, 13, and daughter, 11 both of whom McElhinney coaches in youth hockey. He skis and plays pickleball with his beer-league hockey pals, although he admits they don’t exactly follow all of the established pickleball rules. He runs a goaltending academy, Mountain High Hockey, with his former collegiate goaltending partner Matt Zaba and recently had a great time breaking down the game of his former teammate Andrei Vasilevskiy.

Here’s Daily Faceoff’s chat with McElhinney.

SCOTT BURNSIDE: Did your view of the trade deadline change over the course of your career? Were there things learned along the way that altered your perspective?

CURTIS MCELHINNEY: This was my perspective on it when I was sitting on these teams: It was usually, “OK, I’m playing well, I should be relatively safe.” That doesn’t calm down any of the anxiety. Or the flip side of that was, “Holy smokes, things aren’t going well this year when am I getting traded by a team to shore up this position and I haven’t been able to satisfy that job.” We could go down the list. The first time was a little bit of a shock. And I think it’s just because I’d been with the Flames, well, they’d held my rights since 2002, and then I think I was traded around – when would that have been? 2010?

SB: You are correct. You got traded March 3, 2010 for Vesa Toskala.

CM: Right. So, Vesa Toskala, obviously the relationship with (Calgary netminder (Miikka) Kiprusoff there. Calgary was still kind of in the mix of trying to force that playoff scenario and hang in there, recapture that run they had a handful of years before. That one was a shock. It just kind of completely caught me off guard. I’d never been traded before. Never experienced that feeling. I can vividly remember walking out of the arena and just throwing my gear in the car. It’s a little exciting in the sense that I was going down to Anaheim. I’m like, “Oh, that will be kind of fun, play for the Ducks. Warm weather. California. What’s not to like about that?” But the first time it happened just completely knocked my socks off.

SB: How did you find out?

CM: I want to say Darryl (Sutter) was then the general manager of that team. It’s a pretty miserable call. And then it was walking into the rink to pack up your gear and leave. It’s tough when you’re packing up your stuff and you’re heading out and then, next thing you know, all right, I’m hopping on a plane. Where am I going? When’s the family going to join me? I stayed in that Ayres hotel directly across from the rink in Anaheim.

SB: I know exactly where you mean. I’ve stayed there.

CM: I had the 9:00 show of fireworks from Disney and it was just one of those, my son was born 2009, so he was still pretty young. We were just a young family. They actually came down and stayed with me in the hotel for about three weeks. Just a surreal experience going through that the first time. And then I went, I think the next trade deadline or darn close to it, to Tampa.

(He is right. Less than a year later, Feb. 24, 2011, McElhinney, the 176^th player taken overall in the 2002 draft, was headed to Tampa.)

CM: This one I remember vividly. I went on a run. I think I won like three games in a row. (Jonas) Hiller had been out, maybe before the All-Star Game, was it vertigo he was experiencing? (Yes it was, after an injury incurred at the All-Star Game in Raleigh.) So I went on a run. I think I won three in a row and the next thing you know I went on a slide and I lost four in a row. And that one to me was probably the hardest one. I knew it was coming down. I felt the anxiety building. The team, if I recall, had signed Ray Emery, brought him back from Russia. That one, it felt like a snowball going downhill, and I just knew it was happening. And sure enough I got traded to the Bolts.

(Although this would not to be McElhinney’s last go-round with Tampa, it was nonetheless a brief one as he went in a deal for another journeyman netminder, Dan Ellis.)

CM: I buzzed down to Tampa. It’s kind of exciting. “Let’s go down to Tampa and see how this works out.” I wheel into Tampa, I think I got in at 1:00 in the morning. Had a morning skate, they might have been playing the Jackets that day. Frantz (Jean) was actually the goalie coach, it was one of his first years there. He just smoked me in the morning skate. Kicked the crap out of me. And I wanted to make a good impression so I was just working like a dog. And I go into the pre-game meal and I see Mike Smith sitting in there eating. And ‘Smitty’ had been down in the minors for a little bit. I see Smitty walking around. I’m like, “Oh that’s kind of strange, what’s he doing here?” And within five minutes Yzerman (then Tampa GM Steve Yzerman) comes up to me: “Hey Mac, we’re going to put you on waivers. If you clear, we’ll send you to Norfolk, and if you get picked up then obviously you go wherever.” He asked me what I wanted to do. Did I want to travel with the team up north? They were going to play all the New York teams. Or would I want to fly back to Anaheim for the weekend. So I’m like, “Just fly me home. I just want to see my family.” So I think my first stint in Tampa was maybe 12 hours.

SB: Of course your trip home is a short one as you get claimed by Ottawa on Feb. 28 (which happened to be the 2011 trade deadline).

CM: Yeah I get claimed by Ottawa. I go up to Ottawa. They were in the midst of a run for the first-overall pick so they figured, what better way to help us secure that than Curtis McElhinney, I guess. But the worst part about getting to Ottawa was my gear never showed up. Somebody showed me a photo of this just the other day. So I get to Ottawa. Craig Anderson had also been traded there at the time, so ‘Andy’ and I were kind of living in the hotel together. I had to wear Jason Spezza’s brother’s gear for a couple of games because mine never showed up. So there’s photos floating around and you can see ‘Spezza’ on the side of the pads written and I had a Martin Gerber helmet on. I was just so nervous to play. I thought I was going to go in. This gear felt terrible. It wasn’t my own stuff. The nice thing about being in Canada, though, is you can turn gear around pretty quick. So it didn’t last too long, and I got my own stuff. I was just fighting to stay in the league at that point. It was not a pretty situation, that’s for sure.

(McElhinney signed with Arizona in the summer of 2011, but the 2012 trade deadline period would bring more changes. On Feb. 22, 2012, McElhinney was once again on the move.)

CM: I signed with Arizona to be their third guy behind Smith and (Jason) LaBarbera. And obviously Smith was coming off a couple of down years in Tampa, so I figured maybe I’d get another opportunity to kind of sneak back in there and play some games. Lo and behold, he just has this magical run. Vezina finalist. I think they went to the Western Conference final, and he was sensational that year. That might not have been the best decision on my part.

SB: But how do you know? Right? But you end up going from the Coyotes to Columbus.

CM: I was playing for Portland, Arizona’s farm team at the time. I was injured. I had surgery, and I think I was just kind of a contract casualty. But at the deadline, Arizona dumped me to Columbus. And Columbus, their goalies were just depleted. They had nobody. I remember getting a call from (then Columbus GM) Scott Howson asking me if I could play. And I was about a month off my surgery, and I told him, “Scott, I haven’t walked in over a month.” And it was pretty extensive surgery. But this is how stubborn we are sometimes. I’m like well, it’s an opportunity to get back in the NHL. “Well hold on, let me just take the tennis balls off my walker here and I’ll show up.”

SB: Columbus turned out to be a good stop for you and your family.

CM: I signed in Columbus that year and it was the lockout year (2012) and it was just the perfect scenario in the minors because they had all their young guys down like Ryan Johansen, (Cam) Atkinson, (Matt) Calvert, (David) Savard. Nick Holden was there. Just some really good, good players, so it was a fabulous year. The team was terrific. I got to play a bunch. They didn’t really have any other up-and-coming goalies at that point. It was a perfect situation. It played out well. Then I signed a sweetheart deal the next year to back up Bob (Sergei Bobrovsky). I was a pretty affordable, reasonable option for them at that point in time. That was almost four full years (with Columbus). That was great. Probably one of the places that most felt like home for us. Just based on the time there. The kids started school. It’s a super easy commute, easy to get around. Columbus in general, the team, the organization, the city I feel just kind of has that small-town feel to it, which was for us great. It was a really nice, and my wife had family out in Dayton, Ohio and we’d go out there all the time and visit, so it was a really, really special place.

SB: The Leafs claim you off waivers in early January 2017. Not sure if it felt like a deadline kind of move, but that was something else that happened to you that once again disrupted things for you and your family in the middle of a hockey season.

CM: I think the original plan was probably to have Joonas Korpisalo play at the beginning of the year (in Columbus). He’d done so well when he came up for Bob and played a ton of games the year before. And then going into training camp he just didn’t really get off to a good start. I think the team was a little upset. So they sent him down to Cleveland to play some games and just kind of get his act together. So, sure enough, I think once we got to the mid-point part of the season they felt he’d done enough to earn that opportunity to get back up, which made me expendable. Getting picked up by the Leafs was a pretty wild moment. Honestly I would have probably said I would have rather hid in a market where you don’t have the exposure that a team like Toronto has and you don’t have to deal with the pressure of playing in that environment. But after having experienced it, it’s probably one of the coolest things ever. Getting to be there and the team was fighting for a playoff spot and snuck in that first year. It ended up being a pretty cool experience, and I was disappointed when it ended.

(McElhinney ended up going via another waiver-wire transaction in October 2018, from Toronto to Carolina where the Hurricanes hadn’t made the playoffs in a decade. And yet he played a pivotal role in a turnaround that saw the Hurricanes make an unexpected run to the 2019 Eastern Conference final. He then signed in Tampa where he was part of a juggernaut Lightning team that won Cups during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021.)

SB: When you look back on the transactions, they happened at different times for your family. Does it get easier to call your wife and say, guess what, I’m going to Tampa, or I’m off to Anaheim or whatever? Or is it always hard?

CM: I guess I don’t know. It’s pretty crummy any way you slice it. Because I have the easy side of it where I essentially pack my bag and just hop on a plane and I jump into a new setting with 20-some odd new friends and a very familiar environment in terms of the hockey. So for me it was always easy, whereas Ashley was just left picking up the pieces. When I was claimed on waivers by Carolina, they stayed behind in Toronto until the New Year. But then we moved into a house once the team had expressed an interest in keeping me. The Tampa situation felt like a pretty safe thing just based on the fact that I didn’t really think there was an upgrade they would be able to get within the budget. The Toronto one, we knew that was probably going to happen in the middle of the summer, and unfortunately I had hoped for a trade to be facilitated just based on the fact that I felt I may have had some value based on the prior year and it being one of my more successful seasons. But we still had to commit to Toronto and go back there for training camp, which was really tricky. It’s certainly not easy.

I will say Ashley has packed up everything and moved into hotels. We lived in the Brook Street hotel for I think two months when I finished out the season in Ottawa with two little toddlers, which is certainly not an easy thing to do, but I think her priority has always been on keeping the family together versus me just going off and playing hockey and leaving everyone behind. She’s always put priority on that. As far as the kids’ experiences go, I think if anything it’s been beneficial because I can usually drop both of them into a brand-new scenario and they fit in very well. They’ve become accustomed to adapting to new settings and surroundings. We’ve made that a point of emphasis. “Hey, you need to make yourself fit in,” Not necessarily fit in, but you need to go out of your way and kind of go above and beyond and try to make new friends and fit in and be a part of this new community. I think if anything it’s been fun to watch them. They excel getting into new groups. They each kind of do it in their own little way.

SB: Do you follow things closer at trade-deadline time? Do you watch the deadline now and say, “I know what that vibe is like in that room?”

CM: I’m happy to be a step away from it. I love watching the speculation, especially surrounding the top players that are on expiring contracts or that have some of those trade protections. I love seeing that scenario play out. What are these top teams that are looking to get over the edge going to do? What are these elite teams going to do to separate themselves? And how is that player going to fit in right? That’s always the tough question. For Tampa’s situation, we added essentially role players based on where they played in the lineup, but they were instrumental. They didn’t add high-end skill, they added middle depth, and it paid off huge. And as a result both those players (Blake Coleman, Barclay Goodrow) moved on and ended up signing contracts, which was great for them. It worked for everybody involved. I’m interested to see if Tampa can do anything – if they want to do anything.