Nik Bethune said:On the surface this may be worse than Marleau.
It's always going to be tough to compare Marleau to other salary dumps. The Leafs had a short window to move him and it was clear any team that did acquire him was going to have to immediately buy him out (otherwise he wouldn't have ok'd the trade). So they were trading $6.25mil of completely dead cap space that wouldn't be moveable again after.
A guy like Backes can either play for the Ducks and get moved again potentially or he might even just wind up on LTIR next season (he only played 16 games this season) and he ends up being only kinda irritating to Anaheim's cap guy.