It's a massive risk. Because those 1.5 years are the years surrounding McDavid's extension. If Gibson shits the bed and you've tied up the majority of your cap flexibility on that one deal, you're f***ed six ways from Sunday.Imo Campbell was a great goalie to try. It was dumb to commit 5 years at 5 million aav though. However many argued that Campbell's deeper stats were full of red flags. There are some red flags with Gibson too but he played a lot more games than Campbell and played on a worse team. With Gibson we'd also be committing to him for just 1.5 years so it's not that much risk
If they were willing to take back Evander Kane, that offsets some of the risk. But you're likely raising your acquisition cost to do so. And what it that realistically?