Trade-protection clauses formerly reserved for only the NHL’s elite players have become ubiquitous league-wide.
A whopping 320 players this season have some type of no-trade clause (NTC) in their contract, per PuckPedia and a recent story in The Athletic.
That’s an average of 10 per team. And since players aren’t eligible for NTCs until they reach unrestricted free agent status — or the years of an extension that extend the date they would’ve become a UFA — that means more than half of all NTC-eligible players indeed have them.
“I think we’ve gotten past the way no-trade clauses were originally intended,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said in a radio interview earlier this month.
The Blackhawks have very much contributed to the trend. Bowen Byram and Patrick Kane both got full no-movement clauses (NMCs) in their new six- and two-year deals this summer. An NMC also kicks in for Connor Bedard in 2030 for the final year of his contract.
Alex Vlasic will have a 10-team NTC starting in 2028 (for his last two years), Spencer Knight will have a 15-team NTC starting in 2028 (for his last year) and Frank Nazar will have a 20-team NTC starting in 2031 (for his last two years).
Veteran forwards Tyler Bertuzzi, Teuvo Teravainen, Ryan Donato and Cole Smith all received partial NTCs that allow them to exclude between five and 10 teams each.
NHL general managers, including Kyle Davidson, give these NTCs out as sweeteners to convince players to sign, or in exchange for slightly reduced salary-cap hits. They’ve become almost expected.
The NHL will likely try to insert some NTC limits into the next collective bargaining agreement in 2030. In the meantime, the proliferation will continue.
For the Hawks, the biggest NTC-related challenge probably won’t involve the NTCs already on their roster. Some of them aren’t actually that restrictive, and they view many of these players as cornerstone pieces anyway.
Instead, the biggest challenge will involve convincing talented players around the league to not block potential trades to the Hawks with their own NTCs in the future.
The scrutiny surrounding NTCs, after all, ignited this summer when stars like Detroit’s Dylan Larkin and Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck demanded trades but wielded their clauses to prevent their current teams from widely shopping them.
Larkin has been derided for initially indicating, per reports, he would only accept a trade to the Panthers, Golden Knights or Wild — despite having demanded the trade himself. That would’ve given the Wings extremely little leverage to get a fair return.
NHL stars are becoming increasingly aware of how much power they hold. They’re also becoming increasingly picky about where they want to play — the same thing NBA players, for example, have been doing for years.
And it turns out they generally want to play for winning teams.
That’s where things get tricky for the Hawks, creating a bit of a chicken-and-egg conundrum. The Hawks could use a few more high-end players to help them climb out of this rebuild and establish themselves as playoff contenders, but many high-end players will keep them on their no-trade lists until after they’ve done that.
That dynamic risks creating a phenomenon where today’s good teams stay good indefinitely because good players keep forcing their way to those teams — and on the flip side, where today’s bad teams stay bad indefinitely for the same reasons.
Improving from within could become the only way to shake and climb that hierarchy, and that’s one silver lining for the Hawks.
Their plethora of prospects gives them a better chance of doing that than other franchises depending largely on external additions.
The Hawks could also benefit from Chicago being an attractive hockey destination aside from on-ice results, as well as from the skyrocketing salary cap potentially widening the payroll gap between wealthier and poorer franchises.
