The Toronto Maple Leafs wanted to bring Ron Hainsey back.
At least, that is what Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas said to the media.
I believe the quotes was something like – and I’m paraphrasing here – ‘we’d love to bring Hainsey back but it’s going to likely be too expensive.’
If you’ve been following the NHL for any amount of time, you know this is code for ‘he’s a good vet, but we ain’t interested.’
I mean, just the other week Kyle said ‘Marleau probably isn’t going anywhere’ just a day before he did, in fact, go somewhere.
Then he was quoted as saying “there’s a good chance Nikita stays with us for next year, we’re not very deep on the right side,’ just milliseconds before trading him to Ottawa.
Now, as the words predicted, Ron Hainsey is no longer a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs. He has signed with the Ottawa Senators.
The point: never, ever believe anything anyone who works for an NHL team tells the public.
Ron Hainsey Signs in Ottawa
Last year, despite playing almost exclusively with four of the best players in the NHL, Ron Hainsey put up a negative differential in shot-attempts and shots against. (stats from naturalstattrick.com).
Despite the gaudy plus/minus numbers, the long term outcome of a 37 year old whose deployment allows the other team to have the puck more and shoot more is not very good.
The fact is, Ron Hainsey on the first line of a team that wanted to win the Stanley Cup was perhaps the worst deployment in all of the NHL last season. (Or the year before).
Could he have been re-signed and moved down the lineup? Probably not.
In the NHL who you play WITH has 5x more impact than who you play AGAINST. Therefore, it’s arguable that Ron Hainsey would have been even worse playing lower in the lineup with worse players.
And at a salary of $3.5 million dollars, he’s drastically overpaid.
Ron Hainsey is going to Ottawa and the Toronto Maple Leafs defense gets automatically better. It is the classic case of addition by subtraction. Whoever the Leafs use in place of Hainsey will automatically make Toronto better.
Overall, Ron Hainsey played 161 games as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs. He scored nine goals and added 36 assists. He finishes his Toronto career having played the 226 most games in franchise history. (quanthockey.com)
He will be remembered for Mike Babcock playing him way too high in the lineup and for being a pretty damn good penalty killer – you gotta give him that.
That said, not re-signing Ron Hainsey will go down with the Gilmour trade and the drafting of Auston Matthews as one of the greatest transactions in Toronto Maple Leafs history.