Most of these weren't even good trades. Only in hindsight do many of them look good.
Crediting Murray for acquiring the picks that were used to draft Karl and Stone is doing a disservice to the scouting staff - the people that were actually responsible for bringing those two players to the organization (not Murray).
Acquiring Anderson was a good idea in principle, and one of the few gems found by the pro scouting staff, but horrible timing on Murray's part. Acquiring Andy when we did took us out of range of Nugent Hopkins/Landeskog and put us into the range of Zibanejad/Couturier, also making Andy more expensive to re-sign. For that reason I'd argue it was a bad move on his part. Too be fair I'm sure he didn't think Anderson would win so many games for us down the stretch, but trying to fix the team's goaltending issues when we were clearly out of the playoff race was nothing short of stupid. I'm not in favour of tanking by any means, but imagine how much worse a team like Colorado would be right now if their GM decided to fix their issues late in 2009 and 2011 like Murray tried to do with the Anderson and Campoli/Comrie trades, giving them Cowen instead of Duchene and Zibby instead of Landeskog.
The Heatley trade was also a bad one for this team. It was a horrible return for a recent two time 50 goal scorer. Got a top 6 forward back in Michalek, but had to take on Cheechoo's contract, and Murray eventually gave away that 2nd round pick, along with our own to needlessly acquire Cullen and Sutton, two guys we would not re-sign at the end of the 2010 season, a year in which we clearly were not contending. Heatley regressing significantly doesn't change the fact that Murray wasn't able to get adequate value for him at the time of the trade. Would do the same 5 years later by trading Spezza for a similarly disappointing package.
Anyways back on topic - off that list my favourite 3 trades at the time would have been :
1. Lehner, Legwand for White - Murray did a hell of a job replacing Lehner with another promising young goalie in O'Connor, then moving Lehner and a bad contract for great value in the 21st pick. Elite scouting staff did the rest taking White, who looks like a legitimate steal outside of the top 20 picks.
2. Meszaros for Kuba, Picard, 1st - was never a huge fan of Meszaros, so to replace him with Kuba and acquire a 1st on top of that was more than okay with me. Too bad Murray would eventually waste that 1st round pick on Campoli and Comrie, in a move that still makes zero sense to this day.
3. Silfverberg, Noesen, 1st for Ryan - I had wanted to acquire a player like Ryan for awhile. Big top line winger that had proven history as a scorer. When the trade was announced on TSN I was hoping that it didn't include Zibanejad or Cowen, two players I thought (and still think) will be better players that Silfverberg going forward. Would have rather included Puempel than Noesen, and our 2013 1st over our 2014 1st, but you have to give to get. Deal in hindsight doesn't look nearly as good, mostly because the Ducks got Nick Ritchie, who looks like he's going to be an awesome top 6 powerforward.
I liked the idea of acquiring Kyle Turris, but felt at the time of the trade that Murray gave up too much value for him. Although Rundblad would eventually bust and Turris turned into a #1 center, was probably still right. Murray has a proven track record of not being able to get good value in trades.
