Joined: Jul. 2021
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This is a hard one to analyze, but I’ll try. First, I’m going to ignore Soucy and Meloche because they’re about to become unrestricted free agents. All the other players except Borgen are going into the last year of their contracts, after which they can become UFAs, so that makes it easy to compare them. Borgen is an unsigned RFA with arbitration rights. I don’t know if he has enough years to become a UFA next summer if he goes to arbitration and gets a 1-year deal this summer, or if he’d still be a RFA. That makes a big difference because he could be the only player whose team can be sure they can keep him for more than a year. On other hand, he’s also the only one whose cost for this coming season is uncertain.
Now let’s look at it from each team’s perspective. Seattle gets Lafferty for Borgen and lowers the value of their draft capital. That doesn’t seem like a good deal for them unless they really think they can’t afford to sign Borgen, and they just want to get something for him, though a year of Lafferty isn’t much of a return, so I don’t know why they would need to include the draft downgrade.
Toronto gets a couple of draft picks and year of Hanifin and Toffoli for a year of Nylander and Lafferty. I think Toffoli and Hanifin would be strictly 1-year rentals for Toronto, so the trade would make sense for them only if they aren’t going to extend Nylander. If they do trade him, they shouldn’t have to retain part of his salary, because Toffoli and Hanifin’s cap hits add up to more than Nylander and Lafferty’s. If anything, Calgary should retain salary so Toronto doesn’t lose cap space.
Calgary gets Nylander and Borgen for Toffoli, Hanifin and a couple of draft picks. This seems like a low risk trade for them. They’re probably more likely to be able to sign Nylander and/or Borgen beyond next season than Toffoli and Hanifin, and worst case it’s probably a break even if they’re all only around for one year, and then all they lose is the draft picks.
In summary, I can see scenarios in which this might make sense for each team, but I think there are too many unknowns with respect to which teams can extend which players and for how much for me to judge whether all three teams would do it.