NHL Trade Rumors: Ottawa Senators to lower price for Jason Spezza
By Josh Hill
The NHL Draft has come and gone and players who we thought were going to be traded still haven’t been. While we saw Ryan Kesler and James Neal move teams, as well as Brandon Bollig and others, one name remained in place as Ottawa Senators center Jason Spezza was not traded despite a near deal with the Nashville Predators.
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After the deal with the Preds fell through, Ottawa general manager Bryan Murray admitted that he may need to lower the asking price for Spezza or somehow adjust the deal so that a trade happens before the offseason gets too far into things.
"“I’m sure it’s disappointing for him; it’s disappointing for me because I’d like to accommodate him if I could, but he does have a year left on his contract,” Murray said. “If that’s the case we’ll have a pretty good player for next year.They might need to have a little change in approach as well as I do,” Murray said."
It’s a lot easier said than done to trade Spezza as he reportedly has a list of ten teams he will not play with and all of the teams in Canada are on that list. Aside from that, the Senators don’t want to get swindled in a deal for Spezza but they need to accommodate him and find a trade partner, something that puts pressure on them to make a deal.
Something will likely happen, but the Senators have apparently been going about trading Spezza all wrong and will need to regroup before moving ahead.