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Trade Deadline Rules

2026-05-11

Trade Deadline Rules

Your league's trade deadline is set by your commissioner, not by the NHL calendar. After the deadline passes, new trade proposals are blocked and pending trades that aren't already approved are auto-cancelled.

What "trade deadline" means in FanPoolHQ

The trade deadline is a per-league date stored in your league's settings as tradeDeadline. It is not the NHL's trade deadline — your commissioner picks the date that works for your league, which may match the NHL deadline, fall before it (to give playoff-pool prep time), or sit later in the season for leagues that want a longer trading window.

If your league has no deadline configured (the field is left blank), trading stays open all season. The deadline only kicks in if your commissioner has explicitly set one.

What happens at the deadline

The deadline check is enforced server-side every time someone tries to propose, accept, counter, or approve a trade. Once the configured date has passed:

  • New proposals are blocked — the trade builder shows an error and refuses to submit
  • Pending trades that are still in pending or accepted status are eligible for auto-cancellation by the commissioner's end-of-deadline pass; commissioners typically clear the queue at the deadline so no half-finished trades carry into the post-deadline period
  • Trades already in approved status can still execute — the trade's execution step doesn't re-check the deadline, on the assumption that anything the commissioner approved before the deadline is committed

The exact behavior of "what happens to in-flight trades the moment the clock crosses the deadline" is at the commissioner's discretion in most leagues — FanPoolHQ blocks new movement on the proposal side and surfaces a pre-deadline notification to the commissioner so they can finalize or cancel anything still in the pipeline before the cutoff.

Where to view your league's deadline

  • League settings page (commissioner only) — tradeDeadline field; set or change here
  • League home page — when a deadline is configured, a countdown banner shows the remaining time
  • Trade builder — if you open the builder near the deadline, it surfaces the deadline date in the header so you know how long you have

Configuring the deadline (commissioner)

If you're the commissioner, the trade deadline is one field on your league settings page (alongside the roster freeze date and other per-league timings). Set it to the date and time you want trading to stop. Clear it (leave blank) to keep trading open all season.

The deadline check is one-way — once you've set it and the clock has passed, in-flight trades behave as described above. Plan the deadline carefully and communicate it to your GMs ahead of time so they can finalize the trades they care about before the cutoff.

See also

  • Trade approval workflow — the full lifecycle that the deadline applies to
  • League settings reference — every per-league timing and rule the commissioner controls