The Ottawa Senators will be forced to forfeit a first-round draft pick in one of the next three drafts for their involvement in the Evgenii Dadonov debacle that resulted in a nullified trade between Vegas and Anaheim in 2022, the NHL announced Wednesday.
The original trade was completed in July 2021 and involved the Senators sending Dadonov to the Vegas Golden Knights in exchange for defenseman Nick Holden and a 2022 third-round draft pick (No. 80 overall). However, Ottawa failed to inform Vegas of Dadonov’s modified no-trade clause.
The Golden Knights tried to move Dadonov to Anaheim in March 2022, but the league ultimately canceled the trade because it violated the terms of Dadonov’s contract, as Anaheim was on Dadonov’s 10-team no-trade list.
The Senators originally signed Dadonov to that deal — a three-year, $15 million contract featuring a 10-team no-trade clause — in October 2020.
The Golden Knights and Ducks — as well as the NHL — were not aware of the terms or existence of that clause until after the league had approved the deal. The Ducks were set to acquire Dadonov along with a conditional 2024 second-round draft pick for defenseman John Moore and the contract of forward Ryan Kesler.
The deal would have cleared $3.375 million of much-needed cap space for the Golden Knights.
Two days after the completion of the Vegas-Anaheim deal, the NHL announced that it had invalidated the trade, saying in a brief statement that the trade “could not be concluded because Dadonov’s contract includes a limited no-trade clause, which has not been complied with.”
Nearly 20 months after the embarrassing reversal, the NHL has doled out a harsh punishment to the Senators as a result.
After conducting an investigation, the NHL ruled that “Ottawa will forfeit its first-round draft pick in one of the 2024, 2025 or 2026 Drafts. The determination as to which pick will be forfeited will be made by Ottawa within 24 hours of the conclusion of the Draft Lottery for that year. The League will have no further comment on the matter.”
The Golden Knights issued a statement following the league’s ruling:
“We appreciate the league’s diligence on this matter and respect the decision. The club will have no further comment.”
Meanwhile, Senators owner Michael Andlauer was very candid in his press conference Wednesday afternoon; he also revealed that Senators general manager Pierre Dorion had resigned following the latest blow to the Senators organization.
Andlauer, who did not take over as majority owner until this September, was not part of the team at the time of either trade but said that the Senators “were downright negligent. Our duty of care was ignored. … At the end of the day, if somebody gets a trade, you include it with the current no-trade clause. It’s not that complicated.”
He went on to explain that two teams (Vegas and Anaheim) “wanted a pound of flesh, but the league, by default, got embarrassed through this process.”
Andlauer said he feels a first-round pick is “a very strong price to pay. But at the end of the day, this could have all been avoided.”
The fact that it took well over a year for this ruling to be announced has been questioned by many, including Andlauer, who was blunt, speculating that he may have been misled in order for the recent sale of the Senators to go through.
While some have speculated that Vegas and, to a lesser extent, Anaheim continued to pressure the league, Andlauer indicated that it took the NHL a year to reach a decision following a two-day hearing.
“The Golden Knights — right up to ownership — were angry at how many people blamed them for incompetence,” SportsNet’s Elliotte Friedman wrote in his 32 Thoughts column. “What I missed until the end was Anaheim’s annoyance.”
Anaheim would have received a conditional second-round pick in the trade; Friedman wrote that the Ducks “argued the loss of that asset bothered them.”
In Tuesday’s podcast edition of 32 Thoughts, Friedman said he had been made aware that Ottawa was going to be punished for its involvement in the Dadonov situation. According to Friedman, after the Vegas-Anaheim deal went through, “Dadonov and his agent argued that [Dadonov] had Anaheim on his no-trade and [Vegas] couldn’t trade him there. Vegas said, ‘There’s no no-trade, we can do whatever we want.’ It turned out that when he was traded from Ottawa to the Golden Knights, Vegas asked, ‘Is there any no-trade list that we have to be aware of?’ And they were told ‘No, there’s no no-trade list.'”
Friedman added that Dadonov’s agent was able to prove that he had, indeed, sent the list of teams to Ottawa by the July 1, 2021 deadline and that “a mistake was made” in the original Ottawa-Vegas deal.
This is the third time that the league has ruled to strip a club of a first-round draft pick.
In 2010, the Devils were required to give up first- and third-round picks and were fined $3 million for cap circumvention with the contract of Ilya Kovalchuk. New Jersey had four years to comply, but the penalty was reduced prior to the 2014 NHL Entry Draft, leaving New Jersey with the final pick of the first round (No. 30) and a $1.5 million fine instead.
More recently, the league determined that the Arizona Coyotes had violated the NHL’s combine testing policy, which resulted in the forfeiture of a first-round pick and a second-round pick.
Following the vetoed trade in March 2022, Dadonov played with the Golden Knights for the remainder of the 2021-22 campaign.
He scored a goal and added two assists in his first game following the incident, and he finished the season with five goals and 16 points in his final 16 games. The Golden Knights went on to miss the playoffs for the first time in franchise history.
Dadonov was eventually traded to Montreal in July 2022 in exchange for the contract of Shea Weber; he was then dealt to Dallas ahead of the 2023 trade deadline, where he re-signed in July 2023. He has two goals and three points in seven games this season.