Sabres’ Connor Hellebuyck Trade Update Raises New 3-Year Narrative
· Yahoo Sports
Much was made of the Buffalo Sabres’ pursuit of Connor Hellebuyck this summer and even into the season.
It ended up being a fruitless trade effort by Buffalo, because the Winnipeg Jets eventually traded Hellebuyck to the New Jersey Devils instead.
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The Sabres’ desire for Hellebuyck, though, was clear — and for a point in the summer, they were believed to be the favorites to land him.
It’ll instead go down as a “What if?” for Buffalo, but it turns out that’s not the only such question that Sabres fans can ask about Hellebuyck.
That’s because it turns out this wasn’t the first time the Sabres tried to trade for Hellebuyck.
Sabres’ 3-Year-Old Connor Hellebuyck Trade Update
Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman shared information that, as far as we can tell, hasn’t been reported before as part of his 32 Thoughts column on Friday.
He wrote that the Sabres tried to trade for Hellebuyck in 2023, too.
“It’s been widely reported that Buffalo and Winnipeg were deep in Hellebuyck discussions at the draft, but someone told me last weekend that wasn’t the first time the Jets and Sabres discussed him,” Friedman writes. “In the summer of 2023, before the goalie signed his long-term extension in Manitoba, the two teams took a looooooooooong look at it. Person wouldn’t say why it fell apart.”
That spelling of “long,” for the record, was Friedman’s. Sounds like it wasn’t just a cursory discussion three years ago.
Can you imagine? The butterfly effect would be incredible.
Connor Hellebuyck Since 2023
Hellebuyck went on to win the Vezina Trophy as the top goalie in the NHL in both 2023-24 and in 2024-25.
So if he had come to the Sabres, would he have won the Vezina those two seasons, too? And if he had, would the playoff drought have ended earlier?
The flip side question for Buffalo, of course, is who was floated on the other side of a potential trade?
The Sabres have traded a number of talented young players in the last decade, but less so in the last few years. A trade for Hellebuyck certainly would’ve changed the look of the current roster, whether by trading players Buffalo already had or by giving up draft picks that became current players.
There are two ways to look at this outcome, too. On the one hand, the Sabres may have been better in the immediate, but maybe they wouldn’t have had the depth to build into a true contender. On the other hand, if Buffalo had pulled off a deal then, they’d have Hellebuyck now, instead of him being in New Jersey.
You can’t go back in time, but this is quite the “What if?”
This article was originally published on HEAVY
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