A year ago, rental players such as Antoine Vermette and Andrej Sekera netted first-round picks to their respective selling teams, while a pile of other pending unrestricted free agents went for second-round picks.

The question this year is whether the rental market has gone down a notch, as is the prevailing wisdom three weeks away from the Feb. 29 trade deadline.

"There's no chance you're seeing first-round picks go out for rental players this year," one Western Conference hockey executive said Tuesday. "Those days are over."

Well, we've heard that before, so maybe it's just wishful thinking from the buyers.

Having said that, the premise has some merit.

"The market correction started last summer in free agency with a lot of players getting squeezed by the flat cap and now you're going to see teams protect their high picks and top prospects more than ever because that's gold now, that's the most important currency there is because of the new economic realities," the same hockey executive said.

With the bigger stars taking up so much salary-cap space, the middle class is getting squeezed and teams need cheap, young players in the entry-level class more than ever to round out their rosters. And teams need the pipeline to keep producing young players.

So suddenly those second-round draft picks getting thrown around like candy over the past decade near the trade deadline might not move as much.

"Those might be third-round picks now," one Eastern Conference executive said. "You look at Toronto and all the UFAs they want to sell. They'll still sell a lot of them, but not for the kind of picks they could have got two years ago."

Maybe.

It always sounds so good in theory until the actual market and the competitive juices of GMs take over. We shall see.

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