I think the Leafs would search high and low for a defender with a little term in exchange for Johnsson before they took on 3 rentals

Possibly, but Braun is a RH, can play solid defense and top four minutes, pitlick gives solid two way play and both are reasonably cheap (if Philly retains some salary) and doesn't hurt the Leafs moving forward. Lyon is simply a depth goalie, whos been okay in limited NHL time.
Johnsson is a nice and relatively inexpensive piece, but IMO, the Leafs will have to move some forward depth to address defense, or it'll be a short playoffs again

The leafs have a plethera of players of Pitlick's caliber, he does nothing for the Leafs. Similarly, Lyon isn't the obvious choice over even Kaskisuo for 3rd string goalie, so provides nothing more than crowding the Leafs at the AHL level when they want to give Woll starts.

Which leaves us with essentially Johnsson for an aging and decling Braun who isn't really being used in the hard usage he was last year on San Jose. He's still hitting 50% in shot metrics, but when push comes to shove he's not keeping things out of the net with a +/- of -12, and a 5v5.GF% of 39.62% GF. You could argue his PDO is low, and that is true, but it was 96.9 through 78 games last year, and now 93.2 through 39 games. I find it difficult to believe he would be better than Ceci.

Leafs pass, we can get better return from Johnsson then this.

There is 0 chance this trade would happen. 1: Braun does not fit the style of play that Leafs management has clearly shown is a hold onto, skate the puck possession game. 2: Braun is a old as balls 5/6 Dman. 3: as for the other 2 players in this trade the Leafs have so many of those players management and fans don't even know half their names.

From a Dallas perspective, I don't hate the value on the trade; I just don't know if the Stars make the move. Given where the Stars currently are in their competitive window, they're likely going to be rebuilding sooner rather than later. If they move on from Radulov, I would suspect that they are going to want younger pieces and/or draft picks.

Given his age, Radulov isn't going to fetch Philly's top prospect / young player, or even a straight 1st Round Pick, but a conditional 2nd (could be a 1st based on Radulov's production next season) + someone like Farabee or Bobby Brink could be more up the Stars alley, given where their team currently stands. What are your thoughts on something like this, after the 2020 draft?


Alexander Radulov ($2.25M Retained)
Julius Honka


2021 2nd Round Pick (becomes a 1st if Radulov puts up 15 goals or Philly makes the playoffs)
Joel Farabee
Michael Raffl (to help Philly a little bit w/ cap space)

At the end of the day, Philly is only taking on an additional $1.6M in cap space + whatever y'all pay Honka, and you get a RW that could give you one of the deadlier top-9's in the NHL.

Philly only does that to move some salary though, I could see that proposal if DAL takes JVR instead of Raffl. Dallas needs a makeover, Philly (depending on Lindblom/Patrick injuries) has a lot of forward prospects, but Philly would have to shed JVR and/or Ghost to even get close capwise.