“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” – Freewill by Rush

The trade deadline is one of just a few days throughout the calendar year when hitting the refresh button on your web browser every two seconds is perfectly acceptable. Will your team get rid of older, more expensive players in exchange for future draft picks? Or will your team get the final “missing piece” for a playoff run in exchange for a 4th rounder and a prospect you’ve never heard of?

In recent years for Capitals fans, it has been the latter. This year, many names had been thrown around leading up to the trade deadline, but would the Caps actually follow through on a trade?

With the deadline only hours away, GM George McPhee placed star forward Nicklas Backstrom on LTIR and sent Keith Aucoin back to Hershey to free up as much cap space as he possibly could.

Everything pointed to the Caps having a big day before the deadline. Then with only a few minutes left until the deadline and still no moves made, news broke that the Caps would not be making any moves.

“Everybody wanted to add and there was no one selling,” Caps GM George McPhee told reporters following the trade deadline. “We would have added something to the team if we thought it would make us better.”

“We’ve been on the phones for a lot for about a week,” said McPhee. “Sometimes no deal is better than a bad deal.”

“We weren’t going to make a mistake.”

McPhee thought that no move was the best move to make, but was this lack of action the best of all options?

Only time will tell.