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Craig Custance, ESPN Senior Writer 9y

Ranking every team's work at the deadline

After the dust settled, the buzzer had finished buzzing and those final trades that trickle in after the deadline finally dried up, Arizona Coyotes general manager Don Maloney admitted it was good to be done with the process. The trade deadline is a stressful time for a club; it’s intense.

It was a ton of work, and now the next couple of months for the Coyotes -- well, they could be miserable.

“I think you’re being kind," Maloney said jokingly.

It’s not going to be easy winning games without Antoine Vermette and Keith Yandle. Things weren’t going particularly well when they were around, after all.

But during the course of the weekend and through Monday’s deadline day, no team did more to improve its outlook than the Coyotes. It was dramatic, and the rebuild in Arizona was absolutely fast-tracked.

“You always hope so, No. 1,” Maloney said Monday evening. “It may depend on how this draft goes and where we end up drafting. Obviously, if we draft very high in the top couple slots, that’s when you can really jump-start this reset.”

Even if they don’t, the Coyotes loaded up on picks and prospects to join an organization that already has good young players coming, and a franchise defenseman in Oliver Ekman-Larsson.

Add Connor McDavid to Max Domi, Anthony Duclair, Maxim Letunov, Brendan Perlini and Henrik Samuelsson, and this won’t be a five-year process. It may not be a two-year process. In all, the Coyotes added Letunov, Duclair, John Moore, a 2015 first-round pick, 2016 first-round pick, 2015 second-round pick and already had an extra third-rounder from the Devan Dubnyk trade with the Wild.

The deadline is usually about the contending teams loading up to win a Stanley Cup. That’s usually the focus. But the Coyotes won the deadline. It might not have even been all that close.

Here’s how the rest of the teams rank in their performance during the last few weeks of the trade season, and for those who missed any of my trade grades, click here.

2. Philadelphia Flyers.

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