You're missing Crosby and M.Savard at least (couldn't be bothered to look harder if there were more).
There's only 16 teams who've gotten close to capped out in the last 5 years (capgeek doesn't go back further), meaning there are 14 teams who would have absolutely zero interest in such an arrangement, as salary is more important than cap space to them (although it does beg the question what NYI was doing starting this off with DiPietro and why TB bothered wth Lecavalier). Of those teams, the only ones who haven't signed a player to a backdiving retirement contract are: Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, San Jose, and Edmonton.
So Calgary and Montreal made the double mistake of being active in major FA and not backdiving their deals, hence they're both in some of the biggest cap messes in the league. Edmonton hardly belongs, but they were within 500k of the cap the year before drafting Hall. And San Jose stretched as far as they could to keep their window open, but they were hardly a franchise who wanted to find ways to spend money above and beyond the cap.
So, while I don't mean to give Burke a ton of credit here, he is one of very few GMs who had a market and franchise capable of spending beyond the cap using circumventing contracts and chose not to do so (give SJ management credit for fielding very good teams, retaining premium UFA age talent, and not getting sucked into back-diving. Partial credit to MTL and CGY).
The argument against giving him credit is that BB has led a team far more like Edmonton than the others, not in payroll potential, but in talent to pay. It's easy to avoid those deals when you don't have anyone to give them to. So he didn't want to give Brad Richards a retirement deal, hardly some enormous principle to stand on. If he'd had a Crosby, Ovie, or Weber to lock up, I fully believe we would've seen him sign them to a backdiving contract regardless of prior statements and we would've all applauded him for it.
Imagine the fan backlash if TOR had an elite player and while the rest of the league signed elites to backdivers for cap hits in the 6's, 7's, and 8's, Burke stuck to his alleged guns and put them on our cap for for 11-12m per year. There would've been riots in the streets about how cheap this proves MLSE is and the damn pension or Rogers or whoever.
So I agree Burke is largely in an advantageous cap position because he and his predecessors (to be fair his priors are more to blame for him not having a 27-28 year-old superstar to pay) sucked at most other aspects of their job, but that doesn't change the fact that he deserves a little credit for avoiding things like *shudder* Ehrhoff or trying to get Kessel's name on a 45 year extension. Also, decent marks for realizing that if you won't go whole hog for B.Richards or Parise types, there's no upside trying to go FA for the second tier (well Komi, but everybody's got at least a couple bodies they'd like buried).
