The Los Angeles Kings made a surprising trade on Saturday when they sent Jordan Spence to the Ottawa Senators for two draft picks, a 2025 third-round pick, and a 2026 sixth-round pick. After the NHL Draft, Ken Holland spoke about the trade and essentially said that Spence wanted more ice time and the Kings were not in a position to offer that with Drew Doughty and Brandt Clarke already on the roster.
While the logic behind making the trade makes sense, the return for him didn't seem to equal the caliber of the player. Spence is a 24-year-old defenseman with 180 NHL games already in his career, and he made significant improvements this past season. The fact that he was only able to return two draft picks, and two mid to late round picks at that, seems like it was a bad deal on the part of the Kings.
For NHL teams, they can use trades as a tool for a number of reasons. The obvious is to improve a roster but there is also salary cap implications and teams could trade players to create cap space to sign big-name free agents.
LA Kings won't see much benefit on their cap space with the Jordan Spence trade
Unfortunately, in this scenario, Jordan Spence didn't have a big enough cap hit that would make a significant difference to the Kings' cap space. This season, he had an AAV of only $1.5 million and with the return of two draft picks, that $1.5 million immediately becomes cap space for Los Angeles.
However, the reason that there really isn't much gained with this trade is that the Kings are going to need to sign someone to replace Spence on that third line on the right side of their defense. A minimum AAV is $775,000 so at most they have gained less than $1 million in cap space but are going to have to pay more than the minimum for a player who can fill that role.
There is no question that the Kings didn't have much of a plan for Jordan Spence moving forward on their team. In that situation, it makes sense to trade that player but it is hard to imagine this was the best value they could get in return for the player.