Funny thing is Calgary did the same with Phaneuf. Word in Calgary at the time was Sutter had a Cozy relationship with Burke, and dealt Phaneuf to the Leafs for a bunch of journeymen, even though they got have got a better return if they shopped him around.
That's actually not true.
This may be deleted by the mods because I cannot attribute the source for this information, but here it goes:
Phaneuf was extensively shopped around the league on multiple occasions.
Darryl Sutter was extremely frustrated with Phaneuf because he felt that he had every single tool required to be a top notch defensemen but he refused to put them together.
The coaching staff, and many teammates, felt Phaneuf was a selfish player and he routinely took himself out of position to land massive hits, often at the expense of team defense. Phaneuf was well known of watching TSN hilites in the dressing room and calling over teammates to see his hits. This led to an uncomfortable confrontation in the locker room with Iginla and Daymond Langkow telling him that a particular hit led to a 2-on-1 because not only did he take himself out of position on the hit, but he also "stood over" the guy after like "Muhammad Ali." He was told, in no uncertain terms, to cut it out.
Darryl Sutter, when he coached the Flames, grew very frustrated with Phaneuf's refusal to grasp the basics of positioning and to play within his limitations (he didn't have the skating skills to get back in position when he intentionally took himself out of position.) A large mandate for the hiring of Mike Keenan was to get Phaneuf to play defense and his history with Chris Pronger was a huge part of the hire.
Very early in Keenan's tenure as the coach of the Flames, he went to Sutter and recommended that Sutter trade Phaneuf and said the kid "had a ten cent head." Sutter didn't listen and friction began to grow between the two because Sutter insisted that Phaneuf "learn on the job" and not have his ice time cut. There's a lot more stuff with Keenan/Sutter/Phaneuf, but that is a whole other can of worms. Ultimately, Keenan asked a few times for Phaneuf to be dealt and felt he was an issue on the ice but also very unpopular in the room. As far as I know, Sutter never even entertained the idea.
Later that same season Todd Bertuzzi got into with him during a game because he returned to the bench bragging about a hit and Bertuzzi told him that he abandoned his position to land the hit and that he needed to start playing for the guys on the bench instead of "the guys at TSN."
Darryl Sutter ultimately fired Keenan and hired his brother Brent to coach and again tasked him with getting Phaneuf to play defense. Brent came back, during the pre-season with the same response as Keenan, that the Flames would be a better team without Dion then they were with him because he was much more interested in his stats and his hilight reel hits than he was in playing defense. By this point, Darryl had given Phaneuf a large contract but realized that perhaps he had gone all in on the wrong hand. During the preseason, for the first time, he shopped Phaneuf around the league and was shocked to find only two teams were interested in him (in terms of a trade, there were a handful of other clubs willing to dump a contract and essentially saddle the Flames with another even less appetizing problem.) The two clubs were the LA Kings and the Toronto Maple Leafs, but the Kings offer involved a player that Sutter was very wary of taking on (not sure who it was.) Sutter wanted to give his brother more time to fix the issues because he didn't like the trade options.
Brent then tried to get through to Phaneuf. In particular, Sutter told him that a "great game" would be a game where nobody noticed him at all because he was just doing his job. This didn't sit well with Phaneuf at all because he felt he was being "held back." He also suggested that his teammates were jealous of his success (to Sutter, not to them) and Brent said the only success anybody cares about is winning a Stanley Cup, and told Dion he was nowhere near achieving that. By Christmas, the situation had become worse, his teammates at this point essentially ignored him and Brent had told Darryl (who wanted Phaneuf to get steady ice time) that he was in awkward position where he would discipline and limit ice time for other guys for bad play and he was being asked not to do that with Dion. Over the Christmas break, Darryl agreed to finally move Dion. He once again shopped him around the league and now Los Angeles was no longer interested in making a move. Sutter found this situation was now worse, a handful of teams kicked the tires but wanted the Flames to eat money and/or take on money. Brian Burke was the only General Manager willing to actually trade for him in a "hockey deal." Sutter pulled the trigger and internally considered the move addition by subtraction. When Phaneuf came and grabbed his personal effects from the locker room there was reportedly a round of applause when he left the room (something he clearly could hear from outside the door.) When the Leafs announced that summer he would be named captain of the team many of the Flames were reduced to fits of hysterical laughter because they couldn't believe such a selfish player could be handed the C.
This situation repeated itself when the Maple Leafs ultimately moved him. He was shopped around the league and from what I understand only two teams expressed any interest in him and in both cases the Leafs would end up with a lot of dead contracts. Ottawa's offer was the least troubling one.
