Burke is wise.

I wouldn’t hesitate a minute to give 10M each for the rights to draft both Crosby and Ovechkin.

This is exactly why allowing cash-for-draft-picks would seriously undermine the competitive structure of the league.

However, there’s a bright line between cash-for-picks and taking-on-bloated-contracts-for-picks. Only a limited number of expiring, bloated contracts exist, and the salary cap limits how much bloat that a team can take on (unless they can stash it in the minors). Wealthy teams usually don’t end up with much space; the Leafs this year are a bit of an exception.

On the other hand, distinguishing between the Kolzig deal and the Recchi deal is much more difficult to do. Both of these deals shed Tampa salary and brought players in return. We can point out that all of the players going to Toronto are injured, but the same can be said of the Leclaire trade.

This is just a particularly ugly example of a practice that’s been going on since rules were put in place against including cash in trades. The Malakhov deal was also ugly, but there have been several others such as the Vesa Toskala trade, where the Leafs took on Mark Bell’s contract. The salary cap is intended to reduce the financial motivation for a low budget team to do this, but otherwise I don’t see how you can get rid of it unless the league wants to closely evaluate the competitive fairness of each deal. That’s a cure worse than the disease.

I don’t think this will become especially common. There are a few unusual pieces that had to fit together for this to work:

- You needed a team with financial concerns that was still spending close to the cap
- You needed a team with few financial worries that still had a ton of cap room
- You needed a big ticket player with one year left on his deal who had essentially zero value

Those first two especially aren’t all that common. Generally, big market teams spend close to the cap and small market ones spend less. The Leafs are a rare case of a team with money to burn that still had lots of cap room, which is pretty rare. At least it is today… who knows what the future holds.

What the league’s rationale is regarding its ability to review trades for “legitimate hockey assets”? As far as I can tell, the phrase “legitimate hockey assets” does not appear anywhere in the CBA.

The CBA does prevent a team from trading its “Payroll Room" and prohibits "Cash transactions in connections with the Assignment of Player SPCs”. But is that what happened here? No actual cash was transferred. And can this be seen as a trade for “Payroll Room” when both teams have Payroll Room available?

I guess I want the league to tell me why it feels it can be the judge of what is “legitimate hockey assets”. I think this deal shows you that even if it thinks it has that power, its a useless power. Because I don’t know how the league can legitimately challenge a trade that doesn’t involve the actual transfer of cash.

Here’s a question I haven’t seen asked anywhere: Did Burke need any sort of permission from MLSE to make this deal?

He was basically spending their money to buy a pick. They say he has complete freedom to do anything he wants, this seems like a good test of whether they meant it.

Good on Burke for doing this deal. Its stuff like this that has Leaf fans so optimistic about the future with Burke in control. Who is the last Leafs GM that would have done something this creative? The Leafs don’t have many assests right now so they are going to have to think outside of the box to try and stock up on talent and draft picks.

1) Burke’s mentor Lou Lamarello was the genius behind trading dead wood( Vlad malakhov to SJ) in excahnge for cap space/draft picks.
2) Nothing new here. Its legit under the CBA. Some may not like it, but until the CBA is renegotiated its gona happen

I dont think its so bad of an idea. No matter what you spend it will always be a hit towards your cap. So if your GM is dumb enough to make an offer to trade 10M in your teams cap space (all be it just for that one year if that’s the deal) then I can see why people might scratch their heads at the idea of 10M for an unknown commodity. It will never ever happen.

In the Leafs deal, what makes it work is that all players involved are no gonna play in the NHL this year and their contract expire at season’s end. I was hoping for more of the same but maybe as Burke said this is just an experiment (aka test) to see if it would work… flood gates open, now lets see who takes the plunge.