5 Offseason Trades and Landing Spots for Maple Leafs Winger Mitch Marner

The Toronto Maple Leafs' stunning five-game series loss to the Florida Panthers may have serious consequences for various members of the organization both in the front office and on the ice. After seven straight seasons of postseason appearances and six first-round exits and one second-round exit, something's got to give.

GM Kyle Dubas said he wouldn't take any move off the table to help put the Maple Leafs into a position to better win a Stanley Cup should he return in that role. That opens the door for us to get really creative with ways to tinker with the roster this offseason. The Leafs are tight to the cap and it's hard to make changes without flexibility on the ledger. To make things easier, trading a high-priced player who can net a huge return would go a long way.

Enter Mitch Marner.

At 26 years old, Marner is in his absolute prime. He's put up 196 points in the past two seasons, including 65 goals. He's averaged more than a point per game for the past five seasons and he's a finalist for the Selke Trophy as the league's best defensive forward this season. He's a great player and, ideally, one that should help the Leafs get to where they want to go. But Toronto does not have an ideal situation and they've got astronomical expectations. Marner's $10.903 million cap hit really puts a pinch on what they can do to make their roster deeper.

We're picking out five teams that would make a great fit for Marner. Salary flexibility is, of course, necessary but so is the proliferation of prospects and outstanding young NHL-level talent. Any trade involving a player of Marner's ability is going to be painful, but the key to making a trade like this even is that it's painful on both sides to give and get what they desire.

The Maple Leafs and New Jersey Devils shared playoff disappointment this season, but with the catch that the Devils were just getting back into the postseason mix this year compared to the Leafs' abundance of experience there. The Devils have a good thing bubbling, but they too have an interesting offseason ahead.

New Jersey has a pair of restricted free agents due for substantial raises in Jesper Bratt and Timo Meier. The Devils traded for Meier during the season and Bratt has become an outstanding two-way scoring forward the past two seasons having put up 73 points in two straight campaigns. Meier scored 40 goals between New Jersey and San Jose, and he's scored 30 or more three times in his career. His $3 million cap hit will certainly go way up and Bratt's $5.45 million cap hit should get a boost as well.

Marner having a fixed price and being locked up for two more years offers certainty in the face of uncertainty for what it will cost to keep Meier and Bratt among other RFAs they'll have to consider bringing back. Bratt doesn't see himself leaving New Jersey and Meier's been a Devil for a couple of months. Let's connect those dots to make a deal.

Meier scores goals like mad and plays a physical game, something the Leafs' goal scorers don't exactly do. Marner's talents alongside Jack Hughes and Nico Hischier would give them an even more devastating offensive attack. We're just throwing darts at the wall here and being silly about it, but this would be a fun way to shuffle things around.

The Carolina Hurricanes don't exactly need help. They were one of the best teams in the NHL and they're in the Eastern Conference Final against Florida right now. If there's an area they could use some help, it's on offense. They were 15th in the NHL in goals scored in the regular season and their best scorers averaged under 0.9 points per game. Sebastian Aho had 36 goals and only two others had more than 20 (Martin Necas, Andrei Svechnikov).

Marner would give Carolina an even bigger offensive threat and the Hurricanes' wealth of high-quality defensemen could coax the Maple Leafs into action to make a tried and true "hockey trade" involving NHL players and not necessarily draft picks and prospects.

With the Hurricanes still playing, it shows they're doing pretty well without making a move that would create a sizable shift in how they attack things. Then again, even winning teams are always looking for ways to strengthen areas of weakness both real and perceived.

Carolina is in position to be able to spend some money in the offseason should they want to with $26.6 million in projected cap space with 15 players committed (via PuckPedia). If Carolina falls short of winning the Stanley Cup or even making the Cup Final, it'll create urgency to make sure that doesn't happen again next season. Adding Marner would give Carolina an even more fearsome attack and make them even more difficult to take out.

You're going to get annoyed at us because we're going to mention Chicago in basically any of these exercises.

When the team drafts Connor Bedard in June, the time for losing will come to an end sooner than later and Chicago management would ideally like to make sure the winning returns as soon as possible.

They'll have a boatload of cap space next season (around $40 million with 14 players committed) and have very few long-term deals signed to players on the roster now. They've got other prospects on the way up, but they have a severe lack of overall talent on the big club. Being able to absorb a $10 million-plus cap hit makes Chicago an extremely compatible team to land Marner, but there are roadblocks that are equally easy to point out.

Chicago lacks NHL-ready talent to send to Toronto and the Maple Leafs aren't exactly in the position to move out top talent for prospects and picks, especially when the No. 1 pick this year is 100 percent off the board. Still, a player like defenseman Connor Murphy would be a way to introduce a discussion for a deal, but Chicago would undoubtedly have to mix in someone like Lukas Reichel or Kevin Korchinski to even get Toronto to pick up the phone.

Then again, maybe that kind of offer is easier to make when you know the best player since Connor McDavid or Sidney Crosby will be in the lineup in October.

Sometimes the most fun of doing pieces like this is coming up with the most fantasy hockey kind of idea possible and working it out on paper. Then, a really fun idea hits you, like the idea of Mitch Marner playing alongside Nathan MacKinnon in Colorado.

The Avalanche came up very well short of expectations this season defending their 2022 Stanley Cup championship, losing to Seattle in seven games in the first round. The Avs were banged up badly all season long and they're already shorthanded heading into next season because of captain Gabriel Landeskog needing knee cartilage transplant surgery that will keep him out for the entire 2023-2024 season.

Losing Landeskog for another season is a brutal blow and it was evident they missed his presence last season. What his surgery and eventual placement on injured reserve will do, however, is give Colorado the opportunity to put him on long-term injured reserve to use his $7 million cap hit to spend on players to fill his absence. Wouldn't Marner make for a juicy choice to do that?

MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen and Cale Makar are dynamic scorers but beyond them, Colorado falls a bit short. No offense intended to Artturi Lehkonen, Evan Rodrigues and Alex Newhook, but the Avs could use more. MacKinnon and Rantanen each had over 100 points and Makar had 66 points in 60 games, but J.T. Compher was fourth on the team with 52 points in 80 games and Lehkonen fifth with 51 in 64 games. Marner's $10.9 million cap hit would hurt in most situations, but less so when $7 million of that is opened up by Landeskog.

Colorado can absolutely get back and win the Cup again next year. Adding Marner to the mix would make their offense frightening.

News for the Arizona Coyotes has been pretty depressing recently which is tough because there are good things coming down the road for the team on the ice. Sometimes when we're down in the dumps we get out of it with some retail therapy and the Coyotes trading for Mitch Marner would be a great way to do that on the roster-making level.

The Coyotes adding Marner would give them an absolute star player up front to join Clayton Keller to score lots of goals in the desert and wherever else they may go in the years to come. The Coyotes perpetually have the cap space to handle a player with the salary load that Marner does, but while that $10.9 million cap hit is beefy, he's paid about $8 million in actual salary for the next two years. It's a bargain of sorts all things considered.

Trading for Marner would also make for a cosmic correction on Arizona's part. Let's go back to the 2015 NHL Draft. After Connor McDavid was picked by Edmonton and Jack Eichel by Buffalo, Arizona had the No. 3 pick and took Dylan Strome. Toronto picked fourth and selected...Mitch Marner. Strome didn't work out well with the Coyotes and Marner has been a star with the Maple Leafs.

If Arizona is going to get their stars aligned and right to get their future headed down the right path, figuring out how to get Marner from Toronto by using some of their up-and-coming talented players (Matias Maccelli, Dylan Guenther, Logan Cooley) to lure the Leafs would have to count as good karma.