Leafs talking price with Russell, along with competition

Nick Kypreos has a feeling that the Leafs are in a bidding war regarding Kris Russell:

Fighting with the Canadiens and Canucks, considering their track records lately, seems like a bad idea. Russell had a less than stellar outing with the Dallas Stars for their playoff run, and doesn’t really seem like a play the Leafs should be chasing.

Kypreos (despite his issues as an analyst) is a legitimate insider sometimes, so while I’m taking this with grains of salt, I’m confident this conversation is happening.

However, it was updated shortly after that the Canucks are out, from Russell’s agent through a news site: 

Looking at the HERO chart from Own The Puck, we can see Russell is a less than fancy-stats-friendly acquisition:

His possession numbers are off the charts, in that they’re so bad they don’t show up. His relative CD/60 is so bad he’s past the minimum limit for data to appear in the visual. That’s really, really not good.

It will certainly be interesting to see where this ends up, but I’m certainly hoping the Canadiens are the ones that win this war.