No. 3: John Gibson
Gibson hasn’t been great for the past few season’s, but at $6.4M AAV for the next five seasons, he’s a very intriguing trade target for Toronto.
If you looked strictly at Gibson’s stats over the past three years, without seeing his name connected to it, you’d say that Gibson is a back-up goalie making $2M per season.
Since 2019, his game has gone sour, but that could be for a lot of factors. It could be because the Anaheim Ducks roster has been in shambles since then, it could be because of the pandemic, or it could just be that he’s not any good anymore.
Either way, that’s the $6.4M question for Toronto because it wasn’t that long ago that Gibson was an awesome player.
Gibson had a four-year stretch where he was essentially a .920 SV% and 2.30 GAA goaltender, which would make him a top-five(ish) goalie in the league. The fact that he did this for roughly five years makes him such an interesting trade target, because you’d have to think that that goalie is still in him.
A change of scenery is always good, so maybe he’d return to his old-self if he was shipped to Toronto, but that’s the huge risk that the Leafs would be taking if they made a move for him.