Maple Leafs GM Nonis opens up about Gunnarsson's hip injury

The Toronto Maple Leafs traded young defenseman Carl Gunnarsson to the St. Louis Blues in exchange for veteran defenseman Roman Polak during the second day at the NHL entry draft Saturday.

Gunnarsson, who played big minutes for the Leafs last season and was one of the team's top pairings, struggled through a hip injury for the last three years.

General manager Dave Nonis told James Mirtle of the Globe and Mail offseason surgery on Gunnarsson's hip hopefully fixed the problem.

The last couple years he's had issues with his hips. He had that taken care of this summer. He's a tough kid. He's a pretty unassuming, quiet kid, but he played through some pain the last probably three years. He could manage it over the course of the summer and during the season it would flare up as it moved along and by the end he was pretty sore. So you've got to give him credit for what he did. I think the surgery's going to definitely help him long term. I would expect he'll be pain free all year and that'll help his play.

After explaining what Gunnarsson was dealing with, Nonis shed some light on his conversations with head coach Randy Carlyle about the state of their defense.

We've had the discussion that we needed to rebuild or move things around on our back end. This is a move that does that for us and provides him with some options where we probably didn't have enough.