It's that special time of year again. The 2024 NHL trade deadline is just a couple of days away, and despite the fact that we've already had a couple of the biggest names in Elias Lindholm, Sean Monahan, and Chris Tanev taken off of the board, there will hopefully be some appetizing trades for us to sink our teeth into between now and Friday afternoon. 

Even if the actual trades themselves wind up being somewhat underwhelming, the deadline is still such a fun time of the year because it provides us with an opportunity to cook up dream deals and armchair GM for a couple of weeks. I really love doing these every year because even if none of the deals wind up panning out, at least it serves as a great primer for Mar. 8 and all of the conversations leading up to it. It paints a picture of who is available, where they'd be best served going, and which teams should be most interested in their services.

As a refresher for those of you that haven't dabbled with past versions of this exercise, there's only a few rules that we follow. The trades actually have to make sense for both parties, and they need to check out logistically. Which means that we'll be focusing on players that have at least been rumoured to be available, and we'll be making sure that the transaction actually leaves both teams cap compliant. 

Other than that, the rest is relatively fungible. We won't get too bogged down with details regarding picks and prospects, because the specifics of those can be moved around accordingly as long as the general parameters for a sound trade are in place first. I just said that we'll only float out names we've seen top insiders have on their trade boards, but we'll take a few creative liberties here and there where appropriate.

An obvious complicating factor right now is that teams like the Nashville Predators and Philadelphia Flyers, who would otherwise be very viable suppliers for a lot of trades, keep winning games and are holding down playoff spots in their respective conferences. Their appetite to actually sell the way we might've thought they would even a couple of weeks ago remains to be seen. Their players will be in play to us here, even though the teams calling them these days might disagree with that in practicality. 

After all, these aren't necessarily trades that will happen, just ones that we'd like to see. OK, now let's have some fun.