Karlsson-to-Toronto trade just picked up some serious steam after today's development

Erik Karlsson and the Toronto Maple Leafs are back in the same sentence again, and this time it's a photo doing the talking.

Leafslatest posted a picture this week of Karlsson with Daniel Alfredsson, his old Senators teammate and now Toronto's associate coach.

Fans immediately connected the dots, especially with Karlsson-to-Toronto speculation already floating around thanks to an Elliotte Friedman projection earlier this offseason.

Karlsson and Alfredsson go back to Ottawa, where Karlsson broke in as the 15th overall pick in 2008 before Alfredsson's own playing career wound down.

Over 1,159 career games, Karlsson has racked up 936 points, and last season alone he posted 66 points, 15 goals and 51 assists, in 75 games with Pittsburgh.

That came with a plus-8 rating on an $11,500,000 cap hit, proof the three-time Norris winner is still producing at a real level.

What it would actually take for Chayka to make this real

Timing still matters here. Karlsson is entering the final year of his deal, and Toronto has already shown real interest through reported front-office chatter.

General manager John Chayka has been active all summer, adding names like Darren Raddysh and Emil Andrae to push Toronto's mobility-first defensive identity.

Karlsson fits that identity as well as almost anyone in the league, if not for the cap number attached to him.

Any real trade would almost certainly require Pittsburgh to retain a real chunk of that $11,500,000 salary just to make the math work for Toronto.

Some will say it's just a casual offseason photo, and maybe that's all it is.

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But we all know how quickly something this simple can turn into something much bigger, especially with training camp just around the corner.

At the very least, it's enough to get people wondering what might be coming next.

Whether Chayka actually pulls the trigger depends entirely on how Pittsburgh's season goes, not on how many old Senators photos surface this summer.

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