Trades

Best and Worst Trades All Time for the Quebec Bulldogs (Athletics)/Hamilton Tigers

The list of the best and worst trades for the Quebec Bulldogs/Hamilton Tigers is a little bit like our article on the best and worst trades for the original Ottawa Senators. We’ve had to combine the two lists into one article, because there just aren’t that many trades.

For these two lists, we will be focusing only on NHL trades, even though the franchise was founded in 1878. And we will be relying on Point Shares as our metric. For an explanation, please see our original list, the 25 Best Trades in Toronto Maple Leafs history.

Top 5 Bulldogs/Tigers Trades of All Time

We’ve only picked the top 5 trades because, honestly, there aren’t many good ones.

Best and Worst Original Senators Trades of All Time

So far, in covering our Best and Worst Trades by Point Shares, we’ve focused on either the best or worst for each franchise. However, the Original Ottawa Senators are a special case. The most successful early hockey franchise, they existed for decades before the NHL existed, but then they only made it to the 1930s.

So, there are two issues with creating this list:

The first is that there aren’t that many NHL trades compared to the Original Six franchises.

The second is that, due to the length of the season at the time, the trades didn’t result in huge point share increases or decreases.

So we’ve combined the two into one post. See the methodology in how we rank trades here.

The Top 4 Original Ottawa Senators/St. Louis Eagles Trades of All Time

The Worst Montreal Canadiens Trades of All Time

This list of the Top Worst trades in Montreal Canadiens history is our third Worst Trades list, after the Worst 31 Trades in Maple Leafs history and the Worst 10 trades in Canucks history.

The trades on this list are ranked by Point Shares. For an explanation as to Point Shares and the rankings, see the Maple Leafs Best Trades list.

In Canadiens history, they have given up a whopping 1,222.67 more Point Shares than they’ve received back. So that’s a net of loss of nearly 4 Gretzkys worth of NHL players given up in trades over the years. That hurts.

For, the positive side, the Best 26 Trades in Canadiens History, see here.

So, without further ado, here are the worst Habs trades ever, ranked by Point Shares lost.

The Best 25 Montreal Canadiens Trades of All Time

This list of the Top 25 best trades in Montreal Canadiens history is our third Best Trades list, after the Top 25 best trades in Maple Leafs history and the Top 25 trades in Canucks history.

The trades on this list are ranked by Point Shares. For an explanation as to Point Shares and the rankings, see the Maple Leafs list.

Rest assured, the worst Habs trades list will be a lot more fun for all of us who aren’t Habs fans.

With that out of the way, on to the best trades in Montreal Canadiens history:

Top 10 Worst Vancouver Canucks Trades Ever

Following up on our Best 21 Trades in Vancouver Canucks History we now get to the worst.

This article ranks trades by net Point Shares lost. For a full explanation of the methodology see our Best 25 Trades in Toronto Maple Leafs History list.

The Top 21 Trades in Vancouver Canucks History

When Riley first proposed the idea of a Best and Worst Trades in Canucks history to his co-host Bill thought one list would be clearly longer than the latter.

But, unlike our list of Leafs trades, the Canucks actually do better by our metric. (See the bottom of this page for the methodology.) The Canucks are a net plus in Point Shares for all trades in franchise history through the 2020 pandemic, and not just by a little bit: they are plus 717.5 total Point Shares across just over 300 transactions. That’s a pretty good +2 ish Point Shares per trade.

Here are the best of those trades. See our list of the Top 25 Best Trades in Toronto Maple Leafs History for a little bit more of an explanation as to the ranking. And don’t forget to check out our list of the Worst Canucks Trades of All Time.

Stats are as of the pandemic closure.

31 Worst Toronto Maple Leafs Trades Ever

For our list of the Top 25 Best Trades in Toronto Maple Leafs History, we used Hockey Reference’s Point Shares, an attempt to value a player’s contribution to team points won. (You can read about it at in the Top 25 list.)

The cut off for that list 22 net Point Shares, though we included some honourable mentions at just over 20 net Point Shares.

Because, by net Point Shares, there have been a few more bad trades in Leafs history than good ones, this list is longer.

All Point Share data as of March 11, 2020

The 25 Best Trades in Toronto Maple Leafs History

This list is an attempt at a semi-objective ranking of best trades made by the Toronto Maple Leafs. It makes use of Hockey Reference’s Point Shares metric to rank the trades.

A Point Share is a player’s share of the points his team earns in the regular season. (There are numerous problems with Point Shares, some of which we have listed at the end of this list.)

In order to rank the trades we took the total Point Shares players acquired by the Leafs accumulated for the Leafs and then subtracted the Point Shares the players sent out from the Leafs accumulated for the other team in the trade. We included all trades since the franchise came into existence but please let us know if we missed any.

We did this calculation for only the franchises involved in the trade so Point Shares accumulated for other franchises later on in the career, or if a player returned to the team later, do not count. (Again, the problems with this approach are discussed at the end.)

By our estimation the Leafs have given up way more in regular season Point Shares than they’ve ever received in return. (Though they’ve made a lot of money!) We estimate that, through trades and the waiver wire, the Leafs have given up over 820 Point Shares more than they’ve received. Gretzky is the career leader in Point Shares at 251. So, basically, the Leafs have given up over 3 Gretzkys in terms of regular season wins over the course of the last 100 years.

So the list of best 25 trades is a bit of stretch. It was a lot easier to find the bad ones.

Here they are: the 25 best trades in Leafs history ranked by Point Shares.

All Point Share data as of December 30, 2019