Marleau had a no-move clause so I suspect that he wouldn't have agreed to the trade if Carolina hadn't agreed to buy him out. The buyout may have saved them some money but I think they would have preferred to have him play. They basically bought the draft pick.

I don't think it's fair to judge a trade for a future draft pick by who the draft pick turned out to be, because you can't predict that at the time the trade is made -- all you can consider are the possibilities and probabilities. I think a fair criticism would be to say that Toronto should have put some more protection on it to give them the option to keep it and give Carolina their 2021 1st instead, since both teams probably expected that this pick would be in the 20s. (It probably would have been if the Leafs hadn't got screwed by the covid playoff format changes, though admittedly Edmonton got screwed the most.)

Yes, Carolina did well with an draft pick at # 13 instead of the expected mid 20s. But if I was a player on Carolina or even a fan, I sure wish that Carolina had spend 6m on real hockey player that year instead of 6m phantom cap hit.

There are currently 11 Teams, (34%) of the league that have over 6 Million in cap space and aren't doing anything with it. I'd beg my GM to do a trade like this over doing nothing with it.

Seth Jarvis my beloved

Those teams should've done it. Thankfully Montreal did this year

I don’t think this was a bad use of cap space. Carolina is a market where if they don’t ice a competitive team every year, they lose too many fans, so even though they’re in win-now mode they have to balance that with building for the future. They felt good about the team they had, and options for using that cap hit on a real player would have meant giving up assets to trade for somebody, or signing a UFA that would have committed them to that cap hit for future seasons as well. This move only cost them cap hit for one season, so they knew it wasn’t going to hurt them going forward.

They actually did add a real player before the end of the season as an indirect result of this trade. This deal gave them two first-round draft picks in 2020, so they felt comfortable trading the later of the two for Brady Skjei, knowing that they would still have one pick in the first round.