That is an easy no from the Canes. IF the Canes wanted out from Rasks contract, and that is a big if given he had shoulder surgery and may improve given he looked OK with whatever injury he had, we'd just buy him out ourselves and save a ton of money vs. getting Lucic's declining performance plus terrible contract. Now, this would change if the above scenario was changed so that it was Rask for Puljujarvi or the 10th overall prior to the draft, then Lucic after the bonus was paid.
Rask buyout still costs CAR a bit over 5M in real money. I won't pretend to have any idea of whether your new owner is a salary conscious owner, but that's still a significant amount of money to effectively throw away.
Look at it this way, if that 5M buyout would be considered a sunk cost, it'd be fair to deduct it from Lucic's 17.5M owed over 5 years in my original proposal. Meaning, adding Lucic only means CAR is spending an additional 12.5M over 5 years compared to buyout out Rask.
Meaning, acquiring Lucic with the retained salary in the proposal comes at an added average cost of 2.5M per season for 5 seasons compared to CAR choosing to buyout Rask themselves. For a team that apparently wishes to add toughness, how can they refuse that?
What the proposal is trying to do is to weigh the needs of what (I am assuming is) a salary oriented team in CAR vs a cap ceiling oriented team in EDM, and find sunk costs along with mechanisms in the CBA that can be exploited to create a win/win situation for both teams.
If you think Rask is worth 4M, shouldn't be bought out, will be a valued part of the Hurricanes, this proposal should make no sense to you, I agree with that. But if you think a Rask buyout is a plausible avenue for the Hurricanes to go down, then trading Rask for Lucic with 1.33M retained creates a scenario where CAR is only paying an additional 2.5M real money AAV per season in salary for Lucic.