Ryan O’Reilly, married the day before, was playing volleyball with family.
“My brother (Cal) comes up and says, ‘Where’s your phone?'” O’Reilly recalls. “He said, ‘Your agent just called me and wants you to call him back.’ So I called, and he’s like, ‘Ryan, you’re going to St. Louis!'”
Tage Thompson was on the couch at the home of his parents, Brent and Kim, when Blues general manager Doug Armstrong called.
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“We were kind of joking, ‘Maybe I got traded!’ and it actually was,” Thompson remembers.
The 2018 blockbuster deal was one of the biggest in St. Louis and Buffalo history, with the Blues acquiring the All-Star center O’Reilly and the Sabres getting Patrik Berglund, Vladimir Sobotka, a 2019 first-round pick, a 2021 second and a prospect in Thompson whose promise had somewhat dulled.
It was seen as a fleecing for the Blues at the time, but no one, not even O’Reilly, knew how their careers were about to change.
A year later, O’Reilly would win a Stanley Cup and a Conn Smythe Trophy, and while Thompson would spend the next couple of years paying his dues, one of the game’s brightest young stars wouldn’t trade the way it all played out.
With O’Reilly back in the trade rumor mill this year and possibly on his way out of St. Louis, The Athletic reached out to several people involved in the deal that brought him to town in the first place — and its aftermath. It’s part of a series of stories we’re doing looking back at how trades really go down ahead of this year’s March 3 deadline.
The general managers who put the trade together weren’t willing to talk. Armstrong said he’ll reflect on past trades when his managing days are over, and former Sabres GM Jason Botterill, now an assistant in Seattle, has turned down several offers to discuss it. But we did chat with O’Reilly and Thompson, his father Brent, ex-Buffalo assistant GM Randy Sexton and current Sabres coach Don Granato.
Here’s what they remember.
Sexton, 63, was Botterill’s right-hand man at the time. He remembers the Sabres reaching a decision to move O’Reilly, then 26, because they were building for the future.
“Clearly, both organizations were at different stages of the championship cycle,” Sexton says. “The Blues were close and believed they needed a Ryan O’Reilly-type player to get them over the top. We didn’t really want to trade Ryan O’Reilly, but we knew to get some of the pieces we’d need, the time was right.”
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Once O’Reilly was officially on the block, there was a lot of interest, so Buffalo put together a priority list of teams and a strategy on how to approach each potential trade. Some wanted to send the Sabres draft picks, while others wished to move salary.
During that process, Armstrong was aggressive.
“He was very clear that Ryan was a guy he would like to acquire,” Sexton says.
The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun wrote at the time that the clubs calling on O’Reilly also included Montreal, Carolina and Philadelphia, and Sexton says there were three that Buffalo engaged with in detailed discussions.
The Sabres asked about the Blues’ Jordan Kyrou and Robert Thomas, but Armstrong wasn’t moving them. Botterill and Armstrong went back and forth.
“Players that we might’ve wanted early on, Doug was unwilling to part with because they were playing well,” Sexton says. “Or others were playing more poorly than we would’ve (liked), and he wanted to trade them to us. Deals like this evolve.
“We were making progress, but we were making progress concurrent with other teams, as well.”
O’Reilly had no idea he would be shopped that summer. He had just wrapped up the second year of a seven-year, $52.5 million contract, scoring 24 goals and 61 points in 81 games. But the Sabres went 25-45-12 (62 points), and in addition to O’Reilly not fitting their trajectory, there had been backlash to an end-of-the-year interview he did in which he admitted losing his love for the game at times during the year.
“I kind of felt like I was doing the right thing, trying to take responsibility,” O’Reilly says. “I just maybe shared something a little too in-depth, but still, I don’t regret it at all.”
O’Reilly says he was shocked to learn shortly after that he could be traded because he thought he’d “be there forever.” But without a no-trade clause, he had no control.
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“They were going to take the best deal they could find, and I had no idea where I was going,” O’Reilly says. “You just hope you’re going to a good team.”
On June 22 and 23, the NHL held its amateur draft in Dallas. Buffalo had the No. 1 pick.
At one point, Botterill and Armstrong were seen chatting on the draft floor, which made some suspect an O’Reilly-to-St. Louis deal could be imminent.
“You could certainly feel the momentum moving on the trade front, and with St. Louis,” Sexton says. “But I don’t recall it being close enough where we could say, ‘If we think this is Doug’s best offer, then we should take it because it’s the best deal.’ I don’t think we were there yet.”
The first iterations of the Blues’ offer did not include Thompson, the 6-foot-6 then-20-year-old the Blues had moved up two spots to take at No. 26 in the 2016 draft.
After playing 16 games in the AHL in 2016-17, Thompson had begun the 2017-18 season in St. Louis but didn’t stick.
“Going into that season, I just wanted to do anything I could to stay in the NHL,” Thompson says. “I probably wasn’t ready physically. I was always very tall — but pretty weak.”
Thompson’s father had a better feel for the situation than most dads. A defenseman, he played in 121 NHL games, then got into coaching. He’s now in his ninth season with the New York Islanders’ AHL affiliate.
“I don’t know if he was 100 percent ready,” Brent says. “He was young, and they were trying to teach him the game from a defensive aspect, which is something everyone needs to learn. (But) they were trying to pretty much develop him in the NHL, and that’s a tough thing to do.”
Buffalo saw the potential, though.
“The combination of size, speed, skill, sense, shot — those things were just so attractive for the type of team that we were trying to build,” Sexton says. “He was just a perfect fit.”
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Without Thompson, there was no trade from the Sabres’ perspective.
“‘Botsy’ was insistent,” Sexton says. “Tage wasn’t part of the original couple of offers, but as the deal evolved, he became a more permanent piece. I think Doug accepted that and, like any good GM, tried to negotiate the other pieces of the deal in his favor.”
Tage Thompson in 2017. (Joe Sargent / NHLI via Getty Images)
In addition to Thompson, Armstrong was offering a pair of players many considered disposable. Berglund, then 29, was viewed as an underachiever. Sobotka, 30, had just come back from playing in the KHL.
“We didn’t want our players to feel that we had gutted the team, so we were bringing back NHL players for the short-term while we built the long-term core,” Sexton says. “We were able to ultimately craft a deal that both parties were satisfied with.”
So the two teams agreed on the deal, which may not have been possible if not for a little-known detail that wasn’t public at the time.
In 2017, Berglund had signed a five-year contract with the Blues that included a “modified” no-trade clause, which allowed him to veto a trade to a limited number of teams. The Sabres likely would’ve been on that list, but Berglund’s agent, Peter Wallen, never turned the list into the Blues, thus voiding his protection.
In the days before the trade, O’Reilly’s mind was elsewhere. On June 30, he was marrying his longtime girlfriend, Dayna Douros, and was told not to be concerned about any breaking news.
“My agent said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re not going to get traded on your wedding day,'” O’Reilly recalls. “That was the only thing I knew.”
The next day was July 1, the first day of free agency, which was also the day O’Reilly was scheduled to receive the stipulated $7.5 million signing bonus in his contract.
Armstrong had gotten approval from Blues’ ownership to make the trade and pay the bonus, but then the Blues signed free-agent forwards David Perron and Tyler Bozak, which seemed to signal they were out of the O’Reilly talks.
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“When we saw the Bozak signing, we thought, ‘OK, Doug is signing somebody to replace Sobotka and/or Berglund, so that’s probably a good sign,'” Sexton says.
About eight hours later, indeed, it was announced: O’Reilly was joining the Blues.
The newlywed O’Reilly found out from his agent on the volleyball court at his sister’s house.
“All the family was around, so everyone was just cheering,” O’Reilly remembers. “There was just so much excitement, coming from a situation where I was trying to steer a team in the right direction and now joining this team with the veterans they had.”
O’Reilly took a phone call from Armstrong and told the GM, “Let’s go win a Cup!”
“I didn’t know (the phone call) was going to be recorded,” O’Reilly said, laughing at the prophetic statement.
"Let's go win a Cup!"
Can you believe it's been two years since Ryan O'Reilly was traded to the Blues and made that declaration in his first conversation with GM Doug Armstrong? #stlblues pic.twitter.com/IEZVQgHlI3
— St. Louis Blues (@StLouisBlues) July 1, 2020
A call from Armstrong got a much different reaction at the Thompson house.
Thompson had just returned from playing for Team USA at the World Championships, where Mike Yeo, the Blues’ coach at the time, was an assistant coach for Team Canada. Yeo had been telling Thompson about the Blues’ high expectations for him in the coming season.
“I remember him sitting on our couch at my house and he got the call from Armstrong, and the facial expression was … I knew something was wrong,” Brent says. “It was a five-for-one deal, and he was just one of the extras. It was Berglund, Sobotka and a couple draft picks and then Tage was thrown in there as a young guy that had a hopeful future.”
“Hopeful” was the key word.
That first year with the Sabres, Thompson had seven goals and 12 points in 65 games and ended the season back in the AHL.
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“I was kind of hoping he would get sent down just for development purposes,” his dad says. “He finally did at the end of the year, and you saw the skill set, the elite scoring, the way he could take a game over, and you saw the shot. That was the best move that could probably happen to him at the end of that first year.”
Unfortunately for Thompson, while he was getting knocked out in the first round of the AHL playoffs, the Blues were on their way to winning the Stanley Cup, and O’Reilly was playing a huge part.
After netting 28 goals and 77 points in 82 regular-season games, O’Reilly had seven goals and 23 points in 26 playoff games, becoming the first player since Wayne Gretzky to score in four consecutive Stanley Cup Final games. He won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the postseason MVP.
Ryan O’Reilly in 2019. (Winslow Townson / USA Today)
“I can only imagine what it was like for Tage,” says Granato, who coached Thompson at the U.S. National Team Development Program before joining Buffalo’s coaching staff. “He gets traded for Ryan O’Reilly, he’s a young guy, he doesn’t have any experience, and people are looking at him like … he’d have to describe that.”
So we asked Thompson.
“It sucks seeing the team you were just on win the Cup, and the guy you were just traded for have the success he did,” he says. “I knew that the expectations from the trade were already there, and then they’d been magnified. It just put that much more pressure on me to develop at a quicker rate than I felt I was ready for. I hadn’t even played a full season in the NHL yet, so I was still trying to find my way, and I knew people expected a lot out of me.”
But it wasn’t just Thompson watching the Blues’ success and knowing Sabres fans’ skepticism of the trade would intensify.
“You’re happy for Ryan, but from a pure Buffalo perspective, it’s like, ‘Really?'” Sexton says. “It’s kind of the worst-case scenario. He hoists the Cup and has a great playoff. But you have to accept that that could happen. We were happy with Tage and the picks, and we moved on.”
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It didn’t help that Berglund played just 23 games for Buffalo before going AWOL and having his contract terminated. Sobotka’s career came to a premature end after knee surgery. And Ryan Johnson, the player the Sabres chose at No. 31 in 2019 with the Blues’ pick, hasn’t yet made it to the NHL, currently a senior at the University of Minnesota.
So if the trade was going to be viewed evenly to this point, Thompson was the one who had to turn into something. In 2019-20 and 2020-21, he played a combined 39 NHL games because of a shoulder surgery and time spent on the taxi squad under former Buffalo coach Ralph Krueger.
In May 2021, Krueger was fired and replaced by Granato, who saw the work Thompson was putting in.
“The cameras should’ve been on him the last three years, not now, because every day he kept making himself better until he could break that threshold,” Granato says.
Thompson blasted through that thresh-hold with 38 goals and 68 points in 78 games last season and has 35 goals and 69 points in 52 games in 2022-23, through Tuesday — a 55-goal, 109-point pace.
“I always knew I was capable of that success,” Thompson says. “It was just: When was I going to get there? The previous years, I felt like I was grinding, trying to find that opportunity. Once Donny took over, he gave me that opportunity and put me in situations where I could show that I could score.”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever see another one like it.”
New @TheAthletic with @domluszczyszyn: How Tage Thompson made a statistically unprecedented leap to stardom that is eerily similar to that of another star Buffalo athlete
— Matthew Fairburn (@MatthewFairburn) February 2, 2023
O’Reilly has noticed from afar and doesn’t hear anyone telling him the Blues fleeced the Sabres anymore.
“I look at it now, and I don’t think they did,” he says. “Yeah, it just took a while to play out.
“Every time I turn on the TV, he’s got another sweet highlight. He’s just a dominant player right now, and what he does with the puck — the patience, the playmaking ability — he’s one of the best players in the league right now.”
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Brent chuckles.
“Yeah, well listen, Ryan’s got a ring, so that’s pretty special,” he says. “That was the right move for St. Louis to get better to win the Cup, and that was the right move for Buffalo to grow and put them in the position they’re in now.”
Granato goes as far as to say “it’s in the top 10 of win-win trades in NHL history.”
Meanwhile, Botterill, who was let go by the Sabres in June 2020, is getting some deserved due.
“When you make big trades, trades involving multiple players and high-profile players, particularly for futures, you have to be given the time to let that trade unfold, to truly assess whether it was a good trade or not,” Sexton says. “Jason believed in what we were doing and had the courage to do it, and it’s just such a shame now that he’s not getting the benefit of Tage’s performance because, had it not been for Jason Botterill, Tage Thompson would not be in Buffalo.”
(Top photo of Tage Thompson and Ryan O’Reilly: Bill Wippert / NHLI via Getty Images)
