Sign-and-trade means Marner saga comes to a close in Toronto

Mitch Marner was guaranteed to be leaving Toronto.

For a million different reasons, a lot of them no one's fault in particular, it just didn't work there and the idea of him signing a contract the team could barely afford to stick around and get yelled at and demeaned for another half-decade was never palatable.

So, on his way out the door, a consolation prize: Nicolas Roy shipped over from Vegas, as rumored, where Marner immediately signed for eight years at an AAV of $12 million. (So much for Marner going short-term.) That's a contract Toronto could never have seen through without blowing up a significant portion of the roster, which GM Brad Treliving was clearly loath to do given all the regular-season success that could, one day, carry over into the playoffs.

It has to be said, though, that this was a trade made potentially under duress, with Insiders throwing around the word "tampering" as a reason why Vegas may have been so amenable to the idea of giving up an NHL player for like 20 hours' worth of exclusive negotiating rights, not that they needed all or even most of them. But whatever the reasons, the outcome works well enough for both teams. The Golden Knights get another how-did-they-pull-that-off forward, the Leafs get some NHL-level help for a guy that, 48 hours ago, we all thought they were gonna let walk for nothing.

It's very clearly a two-way arms race in the Pacific now, with Vegas beefing up the roster once again to make another run at Edmonton or, perhaps, one of Colorado or Dallas depending on finishes, in the second round and beyond. It rocks that a team operates this way, screaming "WIN WIN WIN" as they dive back into the fray with a freshly updated arsenal of WMDs. But at some point they may have to ask themselves whether it's sustainable, especially because they are signing a guy who isn't exactly known for his postseason success. Obviously it's all about fit, and putting Marner next to, say, Jack Eichel and Mark Stone on the power play (or at 5-on-5) should work out really well for all involved, but you might have said the same about Auston Matthews, William Nylander, et al.

I don't really worry about aging curves with the Knights because they have shown time and again that the terms of a contract with them are as flexible as they would like them to be, so if it doesn't work out with Marner, well, they probably have the escape route mapped already.

But Marner is a huge weapon for them, and while people may talk about how he can't handle the capital-P Pressure, let's just say the pressure in Vegas is different from Toronto. The organization handled Marner with kid gloves a lot of the time (to the point where his coaches weren't really even allowed to publicly criticize him in certain ways) but the media and fan scrutiny seemed too much for him. In Vegas, all the locals ever do is say how nice and good you are, a perfect hockey angel who's never done anything wrong, but if you don't backcheck or score in the preferred style, or if the team just loses earlier than expected, management won't have much compunction about shipping your ass to Columbus before you can say, "No-move clause."

From the Leafs' perspective, this is something resembling a best-case scenario that didn't even feel possible a few days ago. In Roy, you get someone back who will help with your bottom six, and doesn't cost that much, while you look for other ways to upgrade your roster in what will once again be a competitive division (especially if Boston rebounds, which feels possible). No doubt they are worse now, without Marner, but they made an okay lemonade out of some particularly rough-looking lemons and maybe that's all they could or should have been hoping for. And that comes after a few days of Treliving racking up some very solid wins, from the John Tavares and Matthew Knies contracts to the Matias Maccelli trade. It's almost enough good work — from a GM with a spotty track record — to make you think that, just maybe, they can make up Marner in the aggregate. But probably not.

All told, this is one of those "everyone's happy" trades, which doesn't mean everyone is helped, and certainly not helped to the same extent. But that's a different rubric. And if it did indeed take the threat of a tampering investigation to make this deal come together, well, the NHL is probably pretty happy those emails proved to be an effective deterrent.