FanNation

By Allan Muir, SI.com

So Tampa Bay sends Vinny Prospal to the Flyers for defenseman Alexandre Picard and a conditional pick. Hardly a stop-the-presses moment, but for a legion of NHL fans avidly anticipating the league’s trade deadline, it signals the official start of silly season.

The fumbling, bumbling, stumbling Flyers finally got a win tonight, breaking a 10-game winless streak with a shootout victory over the Sabres, then capped it off by adding Prospal and his 29 goals to the mix. The left winger makes for a nice add to an offense that’s been devastated by injuries, and he’ll immediately slide into the first line slot vacated by the concussed Simon Gagne. Originally a draft pick of the Flyers (71^st overall in 1993), Prospal becomes the team’s most accomplished finisher, and the sixth scorer of 20-or-more goals on the roster.

In the short term, this one makes a lot of sense for the Flyers, who also acquired veteran defenseman Jaroslav Modry last week. Although their recent swirl in the toilet hasn’t flushed them out of the Eastern Conference race, the Flyers were sinking fast. Their postseason hopes took a huge hit over the past few days when Gagne was shut down for the season, and team MVP Mike Richards was sidelined for the next three weeks with a hamstring injury. Prospal, an unrestricted free agent after this season, is motivated by recent slights suffered in Tampa and should be a force for the team down the stretch.

Unfortunately for the Lightning, those public tiffs let everyone know he was a goner, and crippled the bargaining power of GM Jay Feaster. The 22-year-old Picard is a nice enough prospect, a puck-moving blueliner with 72 games of NHL experience under his belt who likely will step directly from the AHL Philadelphia Phantoms to the Lightning. But two scouts I spoke with tonight described his potential as a third-pairing guy at best -- one compared him to Trevor Daley in Dallas -- and that’s not much of a concrete return compared to what teams were getting for similar rentals last season. The deal looks even worse for Tampa when you consider the draft pick will only be a third rounder unless the Flyers advance to the Eastern Conference Finals -- an unlikely scenario even in the minds of Philly’s most optimistic fans.

Although this looks like a knockout win for Flyers GM Paul Holmgren, it might not be so much that he had Feaster over a barrel as it is an indication that last season's generous GMs learned a lesson from their folly. This deal might serve as a warning that teams looking for an instant rebuild through the dealing of veteran UFAs-to-be might not be in position to reap the bounty they were hoping for.