Over the last few hours, a strange and complex trade has been breaking that will see the Canucks send Ilya Mikheyev out for a salary cap dump, but now there may be a third team involved.
When the trade was initially reported by insiders, the Canucks hadn't yet asked Mikheyev to waive his no-trade clause. It sounds like he may decline to join Chicago, so a third team could enter the trade as a workaround to Mikheyev's contract clause.
In his most recent report, Chris Johnston seems to indicate that if the Canucks add a third team to the trade, Mikheyev could choose which team he is dealt to. Mikheyev currently has a 12 team no trade clause that likely includes Chicago, so if another team is added, he'll likely be sent there.
It's extremely rare to see a team trade a player without asking to waive their no-move clause, and even rarer to see a third team added just to accommodate trade protection. If the Canucks had fully completed the deal to send Mikheyev to the Blackhawks without asking him to waive, they would've been penalized a draft pick by the NHL, like Ottawa was with the Evgeni Dadonov trade.
Hopefully this trade is completed in the next few hours. When it is, this story will be updated to include the full details. For now, this is shaping up to be a very convoluted deal.
