NHL trades don’t have to be zero sum games. Fans and media love to assign wins and losses to each deal as they get made, on the assumption that what’s good for one team must be bad for the other, but that’s not really how it works. Some trades can be win-win, some are lose-lose, and most need to be evaluated as two separate entities, with one side having little if anything to do with the other.



All of which is good news for the Ottawa Senators, because man, Tuesday’s Dion Phaneuf blockbuster sure looks like a monster win for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The deal sees the Leafs send their captain (and highest paid player) to the Senators, along with minor-leaugers Matt Frattin, Casey Bailey, Ryan Rupert and Cody Donaghey, in exchange for Jared Cowen, Milan Michalek and Colin Greening, prospect Tobias Lindberg and a second round pick in 2017. That’s a lot of names, but in reality we can scale the deal down to something much simpler: it’s Phaneuf and some contract slots for a pick, a prospect and enough short-term salary dumps to balance the books.

The Senators get the best player in the trade – heck, by this time next year, he may be the only NHL player in the trade at all – and based on old-time hockey wisdom, that means they win the deal. But old time hockey wisdom was born before the salary cap and guaranteed eight-figure contracts, and that’s where this gets tricky for Ottawa. Phaneuf carries a cap hit of $7m for this year and five more after it, which is a ton for a player who’ll turn 31 before the season ends. On a cap ceiling team like the Maple Leafs, that’s daunting. For a budget team like the Senators, it could be a disaster.

But that’s for down the road. In the short term, the Sens get a player who’ll help them make a late push for a playoff spot, and the contracts they offloaded mean they’ll actually save money through next season. And while Phaneuf was badly miscast for years in Toronto as a No1 defenseman who was expected to play in all situations, maybe he rediscovers some of his best game in a situation where he’s no longer expected to be both a workhorse and the face of the franchise. It’s not hard to see this working out fine for Ottawa, at least for a little while. This doesn’t look like a disaster for the Senators.

But even given all of that, this still feels like the Maple Leafs being handed a gift by their one-time arch-enemies. If you’d gone up to any Leafs fan before news of the deal broke and told them that the team would be able to trade Dion Phaneuf for a solid prospect and a decent pick without taking back any long-term deals or retaining even one dollar of salary, they’d have laughed at you. Those fans aren’t laughing now, only because they’re too busy cartwheeling down the street in gleeful disbelief.

From the moment Phaneuf signed his extension in 2013, it felt like a deal that would represent marginal value if all went well and be completely untradeable if it didn’t. And while the blueliner was never nearly as bad as a certain type of Maple Leaf fans insisted on making him out to be, he couldn’t live up to the massive expectations the franchise continually dumped on him. When the Leafs set out to explore trading him, first at least year’s deadline and then again during the offseason, most of the hockey world scoffed. Good luck with that, Toronto.

On Tuesday, good luck arrived, and the Leafs are now free of the only truly bad contract they had left on their books. The deals of Greening, Cowen and Michalek were a problem in Ottawa, but they don’t especially matter for Toronto – all three contracts expire next year, well before the Leafs will be ready to contend again, and Cowen’s even carries a rare cap credit if the Leafs buy him out.

So the Leafs traded an untradeable contract, and even managed to get two future assets back in return. That’s a great deal. And more importantly, it’s yet another piece of evidence that the team’s new management group really does know what it’s doing. Brendan Shanahan, Lou Lamoriello and friends in the front office keep making good decisions, both big and small, and Mike Babcock’s reclamation project on Phaneuf has already paid off. There’s no guarantee that any of that continues, of course, and no assurances that all those steps forward ever add up to anything more than near-misses and disappointment. But after years of being the franchise that was too dumb to realize it was the big sucker at the poker table, watching the Maple Leafs slowly but surely navigate themselves back to something resembling respectability has been fascinating.

And again, the Maple Leafs getting smart doesn’t mean that the Senators just got dumb. There’s room for this deal to work for both teams. But the risk here all seems to be on one side, and it’s the side that just found itself in possession of a long-term commitment to a player who may not have the skillset to live up to it. And the Senators had better hope that this can all pay off in the short term, because they just helped the future get even brighter for their rebuilding rivals down the road.



