Stop this bull****.

no

No... from both teams.

Absolutely not...

this is the worst take in the thread. CBJ wins this trade so hard and it's not even close.

Not even close. With the money Matthews has we wouldn’t be able to keep our players that we already have. PLD, Anderson, Korpisalo and others are all RFA at the end of the season. Not to mention losing our best player. Hard pass from Columbus. Toronto can keep Matthews.

matthews is a strictly better player than PLD or anderson, and korpisalo is easily replaced by literally any fringe starter in free agency. jones is the biggest loss here but matthews regularly delivers a higher GAR/WAR than jones and werenski/murray can cover the gap.

the problem is matthews has a better individual WAR than PLD or jones alone, but not together. that can be remedied if CBJ signs PLD to a bridge, which should be possible through a combination of the salary cap increase and fedor tyutin's buyout coming off the books. savard and nash will also be very enticing trade deadline adds and could be flipped for value to beef up the PLD contract or get a deal for anderson done.

the cap headaches can be mitigated, they're coming even if you don't make this trade, and they're worth getting one of the top ten centers in the league on your team.

I have a better idea for everyone! Jones will not be trading for Matthews. Neither team will make that trade. Columbus can’t afford Matthews cap hit and Toronto don’t want to move their face of the franchise.

There’s no stats of anything that will that neither team will make this trade. The player they are losing hurts them way too much. Yes the cap issues are coming but in 2 years the Folingo, Dubinsky, Nash, Savard, Werenski, and Jones contract come off the books at that’s almost 38 mil in cap room to resign Jones, Werenski and others so there really is no cap problem, plus there cap increases and the expansion draft will likely take a player like Wennberg which opens more room. So cap problems really aren’t coming for Columbus as we stand right now.