The Chicago Blackhawks shocked the NHL by trading Bryan Bickell and Teuvo Teravainen to the Carolina Panthers for a second-round pick in 2016 and a third-round pick in 2017. Everyone in the NHL knows the Blackhawks were up against another salary-cap crunch and were desperate to move Bickell’s contract.
It sounded like it almost happened before last season, but a proposed deal involving Edmonton’s Nikita Nikitin fell through. Bickell wound up spending a lot of the 2015-16 campaign with the AHL’s Rockford IceHogs and was largely forgotten about — minus the cap hit that was stifling General Manager Stan Bowman.