To this day, if you talk about trading a Toronto Maple Leafs prospect, people will say “You can’t do that, it’s what they always did and it never works.”
This line of thinking is understandable, but wrong.
The Toronto Maple Leafs need to trade picks and prospects if they hope to win.
The balance between today and tomorrow is a very difficult one to strike in a salary cap league, but in order to be successful, teams do have to convert their picks and prospects into players that can help them win in the present. That is just a fact of life in a salary cap league, and the mistakes of the past are totally and completely irrelevant.