from Eric Duhatschek of The Athletic,

Someone asked me the other day: When did the NHL trade deadline become so wild? I had to think about it for a minute because it didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, steady evolution to this moment in time. The idea of supplementing a team for a successful playoff run took seed back in 1980 when the New York Islanders traded Billy Harris and Dave Lewis to the Los Angeles Kings for Butch Goring. Up until then, the Islanders were a perennial contender that couldn’t get over the top. Then they did. With Goring aboard. And proceeded to win the Stanley Cup four times in a row.

And because the NHL is a copycat league, other contenders saw the impact of the Goring deal and gingerly, gradually started exploring that option themselves. It didn’t pay off again in such a meaningful way until 1991 when the Pittsburgh Penguins made that six-player trade with the Hartford Whalers to acquire Ron Francis and Ulf Samuelsson — and promptly won the first of two consecutive Stanley Cup championships.

That got the ball rolling harder.

Since then, there have been varying degrees of success — but mostly failure — as teams either tweaked or aggressively added reinforcements for the stretch run and playoffs. Over time, it became an arm’s race — and until this year, an arm’s race that frequently began weeks and even months before the actual trade deadline.

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