Last year's NLL blockbusters: John Grant and Matt Vinc

This is the third in a series of articles looking at the blockbuster trades of the 2010-2011 off-season. The first looked at Josh Sanderson moving to Boston, and the second saw Tracy Kelusky sent to Buffalo.

Similar to the Kelusky trade, we don't yet know the final results of this trade since picks in the 2011, 2012, and 2013 drafts were also exchanged. Again, for the purposes of this article we'll assume that the players chosen in the drafts will not have a significant impact.

The Deal

October 27, 2010 – Rochester sends John Grant Jr., Mac Allen, and Rochester's 1st round picks in the 2011 and 2013 entry drafts to Colorado for Matt Vinc, Matt Zash, Brad Self, and Colorado's 1st and 3rd round picks in the 2012 entry draft.

Matt Zash was traded to Philadelphia for draft picks in March of 2011 after playing 4 games with Rochester. Self didn't play at all last season.

The Numbers

This was a goalie traded for a forward and a defenseman, so comparing numbers is not very useful, but here they are anyway.

Grant had 36 goals and 47 assists for 83 points in his Colorado debut – exactly the same number of points as in his 2010 season with the Knighthawks. [Aside: The NLL may want to revisit their stats provider; John Grant is listed as having 39 goals on 40 shots in 2010. Pretty impressive percentage.] Mac Allen added 2 goals and 7 points, but as a defender, this doesn't mean much. Allen made the 2011 All-Star game (as did Grant) and anchored a strong Mammoth defense.

Vinc had a very successful 2011 season as well, being named Goaltender of the Year for the second straight season. He was also named to the first All-Pro team. His sparkling 79.4 save percentage led the league, his 9.77 GAA was third, and only Mike Poulin logged more minutes.

Other Factors

This trade featured significantly in the three players Colorado sent to the 2011 All-Star game – Grant, Allen, and their new goalie, Chris Levis. Despite the fact that both Grant and Allen were All-Stars, I'm finding it hard to call Colorado the winner of this trade just because they sucked so badly last year. That said, they likely would have been worse without Grant or Allen. They ended up with an All-Star goalie anyway, so losing Vinc wasn't that big of a deal.

The Knighthawks made the playoffs at 10-6 and scored the second-most goals in the east, so they didn't suffer a lack of offense without Grant (and Scott Evans, who they also traded) – both Shawn Williams and Shawn Evans increased their point totals from 2010, Mike Accursi added 45, and rookie Cody Jamieson added 53. Vinc's numbers in 2011 were better than O'Toole's were in 2010, and were better than O'Toole's were likely to have been in 2011 if he hadn't retired. Knighthawks VP Jody Gage said that the team "had to get younger and you build a team from the goal-out". Vinc at 29 is definitely younger than Grant who's 36, so I guess they figured that Vinc had more great years in front of him than Grant does. They're likely right. Allen, however, is only 26, and was barely mentioned at all in the trade description reported in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, implying that the guy that wrote the article didn't think him worthy of mention. If Allen was a throw-in, it was a shrewd move by Steve Govett.

The Winner: Colorado

I will have to reverse my earlier statement and call the Mammoth the winner here. It's not like the Knighthawks got robbed blind – they are perfectly happy with Matt Vinc and have already made up Grant's production with Accursi and Jamieson. But the Mammoth get a few years (possibly the last few years) of one of the best players in NLL history, a strong young defenseman, and let's not forget two first round draft picks over the next couple of years. None of the three players they gave up had ever played a game in a Mammoth uniform, and they got two of them for nothing (Vinc in the Orlando dispersal draft and Self in the Chicago draft; they traded a 3rd round draft pick for Zash). So the Mammoth lose essentially nothing and gain two All-Stars. Nice.