Toronto Maple Leafs: End of Year Report Cards for Defense
The Toronto Maple Leafs players report cards are long overdue.
What kind of guy am I that I forgot to hand out an end of the year report card to each of the Toronto Maple Leafs players?
Not a very good one.
Well, let’s fix that.
It’s time to grade the player’s performances from this past season. If a player played nine games or less, they’ll be excluded from this list.
Pretty standard here as I’ll dish out a grade for an individual out of the following options.
More from Editor In Leaf
- Toronto Maple Leafs: Nick Robertson Healthy and Ready
- Ryan Reaves Will Have Zero Impact on Toronto Maple Leafs
- Toronto Maple Leafs: Playing Max Domi In Top-Six a HUGE Mistake
- Top 10 Scandals in the History of the Toronto Maple Leafs
- Toronto Maple Leafs: Results from the Traverse City Prospects Tournament
- A: performed well above the call of duty
- B: an above average performance
- C: average
- D: needs improvement
- F: you blew it
In all seriousness, I’ll try and give sound reasoning to the letter grade a player receives.
And I will include plus/minus because there are just so many grades to hand out, at some point, they’ll need to differ slightly.
Some will vary because of how long they’ve been in the NHL, with the team and a number of other factors.
In the end, you know as well as I do that most of the guys on the team did a fairly good job throughout the course of the 2016-17 season.
So, let’s continue with the defense.
Jake Gardiner (A)
This is a tricky one for me.
I came into the season disliking Gardiner immensely.
I’ve come out of the season liking him, but still airing on the side of caution concerning him.
He’s good with the puck, don’t get me wrong.
Really good.
But, when he has the puck, which is often, I find myself on the edge of my seat, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad reasons.
He can make stupid and also elite plays.
I think when factoring what unfolded this season, it’s safe to say the good outweighs the bad considering how many minutes he logged.
He stepped up his game a lot and I know he still bobbled the puck sometimes, but still, he’s just a machine.
In 82 games played, he notched nine goals and 43 points, a personal best by a mile.
Nikita Zaitsev (A-)
I was toying between a B+ and an A- for this one.
The reason I opted for the better grade was because I think my expectations for him were too high.
He didn’t meet all of them in the end, but he still had a heck of a rookie year.
And I know, calling him a rookie doesn’t feel quite right.
Still, he came in a logged some heavy minutes on the top defensive pairing for most of the season, scoring four goals and 36 points.
Not bad by any stretch of the imagination.
Morgan Rielly (C+)
I’m a little disappointed in Rielly’s year.
He’s been my favorite Leaf since he was drafted, so it’s possible that I’m being a little hard on him, but he just didn’t perform as well as I would have liked to see.
It was his worst point total since his rookie year and he was a -20 when all was said and done.
Ya, a -20 and he’s supposed to be pretty defensively sound.
He’s actually never been a + player, so that’s just not good.
Not the best year for Rielly, but don’t expect him to get this low of a grade again.
He’ll bounce back.
Matt Hunwick (B-)
I don’t have a lot to say about Hunwick.
There were low expectations for him and he met them.
Nothing over the top good and it’s not like he hurt the team a lot in the end.
Performance wise, putting up 19 points for a third pairing defenseman isn’t awful.
Roman Polak (B-)
Almost the same thing as Hunwick for Polak here.
Low expectations that were met and overall the team wasn’t hurt by his presence because he filled a spot that needed to be filled and added some veteran experience.
He’s a good guy for the locker room and it most likely served the rookies well, however, the Leafs have a lot of those kinds of guys.
Connor Carrick (C+)
Sound the alarm, Andrew gave Carrick a bad grade.
Chill.
This isn’t me saying I don’t like the guy.
All I’m doing is grading his performance from the season.
I don’t think he had a great year only recording eight points.
Yes, I know what his possession numbers are and to me, they don’t mean a whole lot, so I don’t use them.
Trust me, I have the capability of looking them up just as much as the next guy, so that’s not the issue.
He’s still developing and there’s nothing wrong with this grade at his stage, meaning that there’s no reason to worry.
Martin Marincin (C)
Sound the second alarm.
This time you can actually assume I gave Marincin a bad grade because I don’t like him.
I don’t, never had.
He’s a defensive liability.
I understand he’s not put on the ice to rack up points because he’s not an offensive defenseman.
Expecting that from him just wouldn’t be right.
However, with his reach and mobility, I should be able to trust him more as the second to third last guy back and I don’t.
He didn’t play well in the games he played in this year and his grade reflects that.
Alexey Marchenko (B)
I wasn’t phased by Marchenko’s play at all, which is a good thing.
See, if I were to have a bad taste in my mouth after only watching him for 11 games, that would be bad, partly due to the fact that in the 11 games he played, I became very opinionated in a negative way
He didn’t, though and that’s not a bad thing.
I wasn’t overly impressed by his play either and that’s why he’s sitting with a B.
Average, so it’s not bad or good necessarily.