Zibanejad was traded because the team didn’t want to pay the amount of money he would command, given the type of player we had trending to becoming.
They didn’t need 3 million from Burrows to sign Zib. They could have been below the cap and they still would have traded him away.
Zib was looking to be a very skilled, wildly inconsistent player with a tendency to not focus on his training in the off season, and they had to make a decision on a lot of money for a long time.
We were looking to make some noise in the playoffs, and Zib was not looked at by many as a clutch player, or someone who had an extra gear to his game. Brassard was all of those things at the time, and was widely accepted as being the then better player, at the time, which is what we needed.
It’s a myth that Zib was traded because we couldn’t afford him, we didn’t want to pay him what he was going to command, and I personally agree with PD on that one. I would also have been very hesitant to pay the EK and Stone deals given the history of both players.
Zib was at the right age for a big long contract to eat up his prime years, he just wasn’t the right player to make part of our core.
Burrows was just as bad as everyone else in his second year, but signing him didn’t prevent us from keeping Zib, or anyone else for that matter.
That’s how I see it
