Thinking outside the box

Over paying for 4th defencemen from buffalo and josh manson are about as in the box as you can get for a leafs agm

Well in agm you are overpaying or underpaying. Jokiharju can move up a pair if there is an injury and psyk is good as extra player. Good dman and can play forward. Very versatile. Moving mrazek is the big one in that deal. Opening up cap space next year to sign Campbell. Manson gives us a shutdown pair once again as I believe Muzzin has losts left if he doesn't have to be constantly worried about covering up for Holl

Josh Manson hasnt been a good shut down defenceman in years, and Muzzin would be covering for him the way fowler and Lindholm have to now. He's not an upgrade on Holl and neither of the buffalo guys are upgrades either.
And as far as the cap goes, now you have to find a good back up, replace manson, replace Pysyk and re-sign campbell.

As an Anaheim guy, I've said before that it doesn't make sense to me for Toronto to trade Holl for Manson. Even if that's an upgrade (and you can see from other responses that an appreciable segment of the Maple Leafs fan base doesn't think so), it's merely an incremental improvement. If you want to upgrade the defense, add, don't just exchange.

My theory is irrelevant in this case anyway, as even the most optimistic of us Anaheim guys wouldn't ask for more than the two forwards and the future second. And we'd still get howls from north of the border.

Correct. It’s kind of funny because we’ve all been pretty chill on Manson. None of us expect a haul, and recognize that if they’re in a playoff spot, someone will have to slightly overpay for him.

The best part is that Manson has Toronto on his NTC, so every time I see one of these now, and the back and forth between leafs fans of “he sucks!” And “no, he’s the shutdown dman we need!!!!”, I get to chuckle, because he doesn’t even want to go there.

Pretty content to keep him. Even without trading him he benefits the development of a guy like Drysdale, by taking a lot of the hard minutes.

Now, if we could trade Dallas Eakins, I’d be all over that.