I'd also love to see VV get a start tonight. Just to see what he is.
Some of you have mentioned Thornton should get a rest tonight (which I agree with). Do the Leafs have the ability to do this right now with te cap structured the way it is? Does this hurt our ability to accrue cap space for next Monday?
When it comes to bringing VV in, short story is that it would be fine so long as it's Campbell backing him up and not Hutchinson. Long answer is that Leafs are likely running a 20-man roster (excluding Hutch who is in at emergency exception) at any given point to (like you said) to accrue space. So if you want to bring VV in then you want to put Hutch on the TS -- I'm not 100% sure though if this affects Hutch's emergency exception status, which we obviously want to keep for as long as possible. EDIT: Both VV and Hutch are actually on emergency exception, so it doesn't matter who backs up VV.
For Thornton it's a similar story. If he is scratched then either we carry 21 players on the active roster or find a way to get him on the TS. We'd need him to waive his NMC and get him through waivers if we want to avoid the additional cap pressure.
To put it into perspective, the difference between having, say, Barabanov as the 21st forward for the remainder of the days until the TDL (7 days) is about $223k worth of AAV space at the deadline. Math:
Season is 118 days long.
Barabanov has a daily cap hit of $925k / 118 = $7,839 /day.
Times 7 days: $54,872
29 days remain after the TDL, so $54,872 spread over the remaining 29 days as a daily cap hit: $1,889 / day
To get the AAV that 1,889 represents, multiple by days in season (118): $223k