Honest question, but why not buy out Staal and try and trade Shatty for literally anything, even a 4-6 round pick? They are both awful defensemen, but Staal’s buyout would have hurt us less if I’m thinking correctly (which I may not be, in fairness).
I think it was a few things.
First,- if you believe Brooks, nobody wanted Shatty. He's hurt and a lot of teams probably thought we were going to buy him out anyway. If you buy out Staal and then still can't trade Shatty, then you have to make another move to get cap compliant and potentially end up with two buyouts instead of one.
Second, I think the logic was that Shatty's buyout was the only one that would get us cap-compliant in one move. He has a huge savings this year that immediately frees up all the room, but does have a big hit in year 2 due to a signing bonus. Whereas Staal's hit was relatively more consistent over the term of the buyout though not enough to get us cap compliant by itself. As dump mentioned above, we can afford that bigger hit next year because Names, Strome and Beleskey (combined 9m hit) are off the books and Girardi's buyout hit drops by 2m.
Finally, I think the team still sees a role for Staal. They have repeatedly talked up Staal's influence on the young defenseman, and we have more on the way. If you trade Staal you're immediately looking at 2 rookies on the left side, or a rookie plus Smith. I think the left side D looks way better going Skjei-Staal-Hajek than Skjei-Hajek-Smith. On the flipside for Shatty, Trouba will suck up a lot of minutes and PP time, DeAngelo needs room to grow and we just got Fox. You could potentially play Shatty on the 3rd pair but that's not his game nor is it a great use of 6.6m.
You take out Staal AND Shatty and well Trouba becomes our elder statesman back there at the ripe age of 25.
It sucks for Shatty but I think buying him out is the right move. We dont need to make any other moves, so any other trade can be for full value rather than a cap dump. And there just wasnt room on the right side for him.