LeBrun: Maple Leafs among several teams who have checked in with San Jose about Erik Karlsson

With just over 24 hours until the start of the 2023 NHL draft, our Twitter feeds have been filled with news, notes and rumours around the NHL as arguably the busiest week in the league is underway.

The NHL Awards wrapped up last night, and although there were no trades or anything significant happening during the show, today has been the opposite.

Today, we finally saw the Kevin Hayes to St. Louis trade happen, the potential of the Pierre-Luc Dubois trade to Los Angeles start coming together, and, as I was writing this piece, Alex Newhook got dealt from Colorado to Montreal for draft picks.

Earlier this afternoon, Pierre LeBrun took to Twitter to report there have been teams who have checked in with San Jose about the Norris Trophy winner, Erik Karlsson, and the Maple Leafs seem to be one of them.

Honestly, it’s no surprise Toronto’s name is mentioned here by LeBrun. Toronto’s new GM, Brad Treliving, is notorious for calling every team and checking in on several players around the league, as he did with the Calgary Flames.

However, it’s unknown what the asking price is for the guy who just scored over 100 points as a defenseman and won the Norris Trophy, but given he is 33 years old, has four years left on his current contract at a cap hit of $11.5M and will most likely need to be 50% retained or even 75% retained with a third team being involved in the deal, I doubt Toronto is a serious team to land Karlsson.

But hey, you never know. If the price isn’t too ridiculous and there is some serious salary retention on the 33-year-old, maybe Trelving pulls it off somehow. However, Karlsson wouldn’t be my priority this off-season and there are other defensemen out there on the market or through trade that will cost you a lot less against the cap and probably trade assets.

(Contract details from PuckPedia.com)