Canadiens Acquire Schneider

The trade deadline festivities have started with a couple weeks to go before the actual deadline. In the Canadiens' case, a deal couldn't come too soon. The Habs went out and dealt some picks for Mathieu Schneider and a conditional pick. The Canadiens haven't quite been the same without a quality power play quarterback after losing Mark Streit and Sheldon Souray over the past couple years. Schneider will give the team a little bit more quality on the back end to help get their scoring back in order. Since he'll be an unrestricted free agent at the end of the year, Atlanta did their best to help improve their system in return.

Since Atlanta is at the bottom of the Southeast Division, it was safe to say that it's the right time to make a move in order to improve for next season.

When it comes to the salary cap for this season, it looks as though both teams will have to do some negotiating, but in different directions. The Canadiens will likely have to move another player to get themselves under the cap, as Alex Tanguay might not have cleared enough space with his time away, but I really don't want to do the math. Let's put it this way, if the Canadiens kept their roster healthy, with the addition of Schneider and the sending down of Ryan O'Byrne, their 23-man roster would be worth $58.6 million. That's $1.9 million over the cap and I don't believe there was enough taken away to cover that with injury and put back with replacements. On the other side of the coin, if we made an active 23-man roster for Atlanta without Schneider, it would be worth $38.1 million, which isn't too bad. Of course you can add half of Schneider's salary and they aren't in bad shape. Don't believe the hype of moving players in to do the business.

			2008-2009 Statistics		2009	2010
To Montreal	Position	Age	GP/MIN	Points	Cap Hit	Cap Hit
Mathieu Schneider	D	39	44	15	$5.625 million	UFA
2009 Conditional Pick
			2008-2009 Statistics		2009	2010
To Atlanta	Position	Age	GP/MIN	Points	Cap Hit	Cap Hit
2009 2nd Round Pick
2010 3rd Round Pick

Well, on the pool side of things, Schneider is a Draft pick of Derek's this season and he's currently 70 points out of first and 66 out of the money, so this does not have much of an impact in the Draft at all. On the Sheet, Schneider does appear on quite a few teams, so this trade could make a pretty big impact if teams have him. Just an FYI, three of the top six teams on the Sheet have Schneider, including the leader, Dale C.. He is quite obviously heading to a better team in Montreal and one with many weapons. His offensive talents should compliment that, but nothing is certain at this point in Montreal.