Luongo was nearly traded to Bruins before Canucks got him
Not long before he was traded to the Vancouver Canucks, Roberto Luongo was nearly dealt to the Boston Bruins.
This is according to Jeff Marek, who told a story he heard from former Florida Panthers general manager Mike Keenan on the 32 Thoughts podcast today.
Luongo, who couldn’t agree to a contract extension during his first stint with the Panthers in 2005-06, was eventually traded by Keenan to the Canucks. But before that, Marek said Keenan had a deal in place to send Luongo to Boston.
The player they’d get in return? Joe Thornton.
“One of the things he told me from when he was managing the Florida Panthers was they tried to get Joe Thornton from Boston and the deal that Mike had in place was Thornton for Roberto Luongo one-for-one,” Marek explained. “But the Panthers’ owner didn’t want to take money back.”
The trade was apparently on the table sometime around the 2005-06 season. Thornton was traded to the San Jose Sharks on November 30, 2005 — seven months before Luongo was dealt to Vancouver.
Luongo going to the Bruins during that time would have altered the course of hockey history.
Without Luongo, the Bruins signed Tim Thomas who had plans to play in Finland that season. Thomas would blossom into one of the better starting goaltenders in the league, playing a huge role in the team’s 2011 Stanley Cup victory against the Canucks.
Would Luongo have put up even better numbers behind a stout Bruins’ defence? He certainly would have been a better return for the Bruins than the eventual package of Marco Sturm, Wayne Primeau, and Brad Stuart that they accepted for Thornton.
Luongo was instead later traded to the Canucks in the summer of 2006. The Canucks gave up Todd Bertuzzi, Alex Auld, and Bryan Allen for Luongo, Lukas Krajicek, and a sixth-round draft pick.
“I think it’s a very good day for the Florida Panthers,” Keenan said at the time. “We tried and worked very hard at resolving a contract situation with Roberto Luongo. As an organization, we made a decision we had to move forward and doing so satisfied a lot of
the needs that we had.”
The trade worked out very well for the Canucks, who rode Luongo to a Stanley Cup Final appearance in 2011 against the Bruins. They would eventually trade Luongo back to the Panthers in exchange for a Jacob Markstrom and Shawn Matthias, solidifying their crease for many more years.
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