On the surface, Shayne Gostisbehere and Nick Ritchie don’t have much in common.

After his first NHL season, Gostisbehere finished one spot ahead of Connor McDavid in Calder Trophy voting and was named a member of Team North America at the 2016 World Cup of Hockey.

Meanwhile, Ritchie scored four points in 33 games as a rookie and wouldn’t reach 15 goals until his sixth NHL season, nearly eight full years after being drafted 10th overall by the Anaheim Ducks in 2014.

Gostisbehere was a third-round pick of the Philadelphia Flyers back in 2012. At 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds, he’s relatively small for an NHL defenseman but is an excellent skater.

Ritchie (6-foot-2, 234 pounds) is one of the heaviest players in the league. His hometown of Orangeville, Ontario is located just an hour northwest of Toronto, the center of the hockey universe; Gostisbehere grew up in Pembroke Pines, Florida.

But Gostisbehere and Ritchie do share at least one thing — and it relates to how they both joined the Arizona Coyotes.

They were salary dumps. Emphasis on were.

These days, Gostisbehere and Ritchie look like early candidates to be among the most sought-after players at the trade deadline next March. They’re both set to hit free agency after this season and would make sense as rental players for a whole host of contending teams.

It wasn’t always this way. Prior to the start of the 2021–22 season, the Flyers gave up two draft picks (including a 2022 second-rounder) to offload the final two years of Gostisbehere’s contract, which carries a $4.5 million annual cap hit. In return, the Flyers received “future considerations” — AKA, nothing.

The Toronto Maple Leafs paid a similar price (a 2025 second) six months later to move Ritchie, who the club had previously signed for two years at a $2.5 million AAV. Ritchie hadn’t been a fit in Toronto and the Maple Leafs also received depth players Ilya Lyubushkin and Ryan Dzingel from Arizona in the trade.

Both Gostisbehere and Ritchie have since gone from being castoffs to part of the main cast with the rebuilding Coyotes.

“I lost my confidence a little there in Philly,” Gostisbehere told Daily Faceoff after the Coyotes’ practice in Scottsdale on Saturday. “Getting traded for pretty much a used puck bag is pretty tough to swallow sometimes. Burns a fire in you a little bit to prove some people wrong.”

Gostisbehere, 29, has rediscovered his offensive dominance since first arriving in Arizona last summer. He scored 14 goals and 51 points in 82 games with the Coyotes in 2021–22 and is off to a point-per-game start through eight appearances this season.

Even at the end of his tenure in Philadelphia, Gostisbehere was flying under the radar a little bit as one of the NHL’s most efficient goal-scoring defensemen. But he’s taken that to a new level in the desert.