Chicago, Detroit exchange scorers; Hawks lose Havlat
I think Chicago came out ahead Wednesday, when it and Detroit swapped a pair of professional athletes that score an awful lot in the winter months.
There were no trades involved. Instead, a couple of free agents that played for one of the cities in 2008-09 signed with the team based in the other. The Blackhawks stole the top scorer from the Red Wings, as they signed Marian Hossa to a 12-year deal (that's not a typo). It was part of a flurry of Hawks-related transactions that included them losing standout free-agent winger Martin Havlat to the Minnesota Wild. The same day, the Pistons signed the guy that led them in scoring in the regular season and looked like a truly elite scorer in the playoffs in Ben Gordon.
Hossa signed a one-year deal with Detroit heading into last season, hoping to win an elusive Stanley Cup championship. He was a major reason the Red Wings got so close, leading them with 40 goals and finishing third among them with 71 points. At the same time, the sniper was ineffective in the Stanley Cup finals, which Detroit lost to Pittsburgh. Here's hoping he bounces back and pushes a Hawks team that got as far as the Western Conference finals over the top.
Havlat I'll miss, and I'll also miss Nikolai Khabibulin, the goalie who signed with Edmonton. Both were likely to leave, though, especially after the Hawks committed a king's ransom to Hossa. It's so exciting to see the Hawks make this kind of splash, though. There was a time where seeing Hossa listed as the top free-agent available, as I did in Wednesday's Chicago Tribune, only meant that there was absolutely no way he was coming to Chicago. Under the current regime, he was a Blackhawk the same day I read that capsule.
As for the Bulls, I belive they were wise not to match the reported $55 million over five years that the Pistons gave to Gordon. Gordon has a career scoring per-game average of 18.5 points, and he upped that to 20.7 per game last season. He had a couple of games in the Bulls' first-round playoff series with Boston where he simply couldn't be stopped.
At the same time, all Gordon really does is score. He's a pretty major defensive liability, and he's sometimes a liability on offense because he doesn't spread the ball around. His scoring ability is valuable enough that he'd have been worth retaining ... for the right price. Chicago will have to find the points he provided somewhere, but the Bulls were wise to let him walk for the price he got from the Pistons.
