(ED. NOTE: This published earlier, but the blog ate it. Here it is again.)

The problem with no-trade or no-movement clauses in NHL player contracts is that you have to give them out a lot.

This isn't so much a problem from the players' perspective obviously, because these clauses in their contracts give them significant power, but they do put teams in a tough spot. Today, Capgeek says 176 players currently under contract have at least some kind of no-trade in place — some of those have been waived already, and are therefore void, and others haven't kicked in yet — and that doesn't include a few who had them but ended up being on the receiving end of compliance buyouts. That's nearly six players per team, or almost one-third of a roster.

That's a lot of guys that you can't trade easily, and as you might imagine, these are high-cost contracts given to players who are usually quite valuable, and it is to some extent part of doing business. If teams can keep a good player's cap number down by $1 million or so by giving them such a contract feature, they seem to figure it should be worth it.

In the end, it's often self-defeating, as evidenced by the weekend's happenings. The first of these was obviously the trade that sent Ryan Kesler to a now-totally stacked Anaheim team for relative peanuts. Say what you want about the season Nick Bonino had last year — it was good, not great — but he's a 26-year-old who had a career year behind a pretty big jump in PDO. Luca Sbisa is a borderline NHLer. The 24th overall pick doesn't begin to help in the near term.

The reason for this is that though Kesler was by far the best player in the deal, Jim Benning simply had no leverage at all. Kesler had a straight no-trade clause, so unless he was going exactly where he wanted, he wasn't going anywhere. Bob Murray knew that. He consequently shorted the Canucks in terms of value because he knew he could. If this sounds familiar to Canucks fans, it might be because the same problem kicked up last winter when Roberto Luongo went to Florida and Vancouver got a bag of pucks in return.

Meanwhile, Jason Spezza seems to have shot down a trade that would have gotten him out of Ottawa and into Nashville, where he might have been a good fit. But Spezza has Nashville on his list of cities to which he cannot be moved if he doesn't want to, and his not-wanting to probably speaks to both that rumor that he didn't ask out Ottawa at all, and that he wants to play for a team with a chance to compete seriously for a Cup next year. But as with Kesler, the number of teams perceived to be able to do that and squeeze a player with his cap hit onto their roster is not likely to be high. The Senators, cash-strapped as they seem to be these days, would no doubt love to move that contract, but they can't. Spezza's conditions aren't easy to meet: No Canada, contenders only (this sentence is redundant, by the way).

So many other teams have learned this lesson the hard way in recent years as well. Calgary is probably chief among them. The Flames used to hand out no-trades like it was going out of style and look where it — plus a number of other organizational failings — got them. San Jose is currently finding it difficult with respect to moving Joe Thornton.

It gets back to that question of whether saving $1 million, maybe $2 million, on a restricted free agent — which is what both Kesler and Spezza were when they re-upped — is worth it to hamstring your chances to move an asset if things go sideways. You can bet Bryan Murray didn't give Spezza his current contract (seven years at a total cost of $49 million) thinking “Y'know, by the end of this, we could be awful and he might want to, or have to, go.”

Mike Gillis likewise probably didn't see things going south for Vancouver when they did. You can tell by how he built that roster overall. They might also have thought they'd kick the can down the road and maybe they wouldn't be in their jobs any more to begin with, so it would become someone else's problem.

Of course, that's not the way all general managers' have to give out no-trades and no-moves. Some have to provide them as a condition of netting a targeted unrestricted free agent. David Clarkson, for instance, isn't likely to go anywhere other than his current home of Toronto, because he currently has a modified no-trade clause (he can submit a list of 14 teams to which he cannot be traded), and a no-movement clause so he can't be put on waivers or sent to the minors. This also more or less prevents him from being bought out at any point.