Is Kerfoot better enough than Engvall to justify that tradeoff? Is he so good that he's worth essentially guaranteeing Benn/Mete see ~40 games, and that we *need* to add a solid depth defender?
Kerfoot is better enough than Engvall, yes. Better skater, smarter, better play maker, better pker. Especially better if he can finally put together a 20 goal season to go with his assists, or scaled to the equivalent bottom 6 numbers if Robertson pushes him down. He will be at the average age of cup winning teams as well, 28, next season. So if this is the best year of his career, you want it to happen as a Leaf unless you have a better option coming in, an ELC breakout(s) is too good to bench, or a return value that would be stupid to refuse in a trade.
Every season we cry about not having these playoff breakout players to help the core so I'm not trading Kerfoot to bank on one of the worst playoff performers of the last 2 seasons, league wide, in Engvall.
Kerfoot smokes Engvalls PK% ice time share, their placing on the PK depth chart isn't even close. Engvall is one of our most over rated pkers we have. He's only top 4 for forwards right now because Mik is gone. The PK runs through kampf marner and kerfoot as far as forwards go and NAK can easily take Engvalls spot.
The rest of the cap stuff Dubas will figure out. That might seem like a cop out answer but objectively speaking he does always get us cap compliant. Will he make the right move and not sacrifice Kerfoot just for paper reasons? Remains to be seen. There's a lot of "what if" keeping Kerfoot and not keeping Kerfoot so focusing on Benn and Mete right now as factors to let Kerfoot go doesn't make sense to me.
I can be on board a trade Kerfoot train, it's just not time to entertain that idea yet.
