Unbelievable!! We have to be one of the few teams in the NHL that is not carrying a bad contract....and Mr. Murray has moved 3 of them in the last 8 months. Kudos to him!
Let's not be delusional and say that Phaneuf's contract is a good one. It's not bad for an 'internal cap' or I'd like to say now just a team with lots of cap room team since we don't seem to be shy of spending, but for any of the top spending 20 teams, it's a huge anchor. A second pairing Dman getting paid 7million until he's 35 is not very good cap management and he's already at 30 yo so his play will likely begin to regress, if the average NHL career is any indication, at the halfway point of his tenure here at 33 yo.
How were other teams not all over this? Toronto took 3 bad contracts, a 2nd and a B prospect for an impact dman who can play both sides, PK and PP. We got lucky to acquire Dion for so little
Luckily, his dollars are a little less so the team's budget isn't thrown off completely (even at 6.6mil it's kind of steep, but his contract shouldn't hinder our future decisions), but for teams that do need help on D and might've wanted a guy of Phaneuf's caliber, his cap hit was too much. For example: Philly, Tampa, Vancouver, Rangers, Flames, Boston, Sharks, Dallas, Edmonton...and the list goes on, all have under 3million cap space (with the exception of Edmonton).
Each team has their own monster contracts that Toronto would've likely needed tp take back (A.Macdonald, Callahan/Carle, Miller/Sbisa/Burrows, Staal/Girardi, Frolik/Jones, Beleskey/Seidenberg, Martin/Ward, Spezza/Lehtonen, and Fayne/Ference/Sekera).
Why would Toronto have taken our dumps and not these? Most are tied down for 3+ years with these contracts and they're singularly equal to basically all three of ours combined.
I like Phaneuf and I think trading for him was a good move and took great execution by GMBM but we're one of the few teams for which this move works out in our favour, more so than it does them but still overall mutually beneficial.
