The price to offload Marleau’s remaining year: a conditional first-round pick in the 2020 draft that is top-10 protected (shifts to 2021 if it’s inside the top 10) and a seventh-round pick in 2020. The Leafs will receive Carolina’s sixth-round pick in 2020 as the asset coming back in the deal.
The Leafs have taken a harsh dose of medicine here in order to gain significant and much-needed cap flexibility, giving them around $14 million in cap space to get RFAs Mitch Marner, Andreas Johnsson, and Kasperi Kapanen under contract. They’re also looking to shore up their center and defensive depth, so $14 million won’t be enough to cover all of those tasks, but Kyle Dubas is nowhere near done here, with Connor Brown and Nikita Zaitsev both also being shopped for cap reasons.