The Toronto Maple Leafs have had a very buys start to the off-season.
First, the Toronto Maple Leafs hit up the NHL Entry Draft, where they unloaded Patrick Marleau to the Carolina Hurricanes.
Then, the next week during the NHL Free Agent Frenzy, the Leafs added Jason Spezza, Nick Shore, Kenny Agostino, and made two trades.
The first sent Connor Brown and Nikita Zaitsev to the Ottawa Senators for Cody Ceci, Aaron Luchuck, and Ben Harpur.
Later that same day, the leafs sent Nazem Kadri and Calle Rosen to the Colorado Avalanche for Alexander Kerfoot and Tyson Barrie.
The Toronto Maple Leafs may not be done, but the question must be asked – up to this point, are they any better than they were?
Are the Toronto Maple Leafs Any Better?
Last year, the Leafs were one of the NHL’s best teams. They had some injury troubles, some PP troubles, and they didn’t dress their optimal lineup for a single game all season long.
Yet they still finished a respectable seventh overall, and were a couple bad decisions from Mike Babcock (or a suspended Kadri, or a healthy Jake Gardiner) away from beating Boston and cake-walking to the Finals.
It’s worth noting that the Leafs are a significantly better than the St. Louis Blues team that ended up winning the Stanley Cup.
But after they changed almost a third of their lineup, are they any better?
Out: Patrick Marleau, Ron Hainsey, Connor Brown, Nikita Zaitsev, Nazem Kadri, Jake Gardiner.
In: Tyson Barrie, Alexander Kerfoot, Ilya Mikheyev, Cody Ceci, Aaron Luchuk, Harper, Keven Gravel, Kenny Agostino, Nick Shore, Jason Spezza.
If you’re just reading the list, it might seem like the Leafs lost a lot of talent, but they didn’t actually lose much of anything.
Marleau and Brown were scoring at 4th line rates. Hainsey and Zaitsev were abjectly terrible and playing in incomprehensible lineup spots.
Kadri had a large impact, and so did Jake Gardiner. There is no sugar coating their loss.
Coming to the team, the Leafs get Kerfoot to replace Kadri, and while he won’t score as much, he’s much, much better defensively. The Leafs didn’t need Kadri’s scoring (they have a ton of offense) and were short on defensive forwards. This is a down grade if you compare the player’s overall impact, but in the context of Toronto’s lineup, it’s an upgrade.
Gardiner (assuming he doesn’t come back) is the biggest loss. At 5v5 he has had more impact than all but a handful of NHL defensemen over the last three years. He is insanely underrated, and his loss is significant.
Tyson Barrie probably can’t score 59 points playing as the #2 offensive option behind Rielly, and his overall game is much worse than Gardiner’s. This is a downgrade, although probably not a big one.
Marleau, Brown, Hainsey and Zaitsev don’t matter. They all made way too much money for what they brought to the table, and the Leafs can (and did) replace them with cheaper players who are guaranteed not to be any worse.
Replacing them with Spezza, Mikheyev, Ceci and literally anyone (Harpur, Liljegren, whoever) is at worst a wash, and possibly better since all the replacements at least have more upside than the players they are replacing.
Final Assessment
The Toronto Maple Leafs lost two players of consequence (Gardiner and Kadri) and replaced them with two players of consequence (Kerfoot and Barrie).
That alone should help the team, as long as Barrie doesn’t turn out to be a huge drop off from Gardiner (entirely possible).
As for the rest, the Leafs lost replacement players, and replaced them with replacement players with upside. Shore, Spezza, Agostino and Mikheyev might not move the needle, but they’ve all got more upside than the players they are replacing, and they’re all signed for the league minimum.
The Leafs (assuming they sign Marner) kept all their major players (including Johnsson and Kapanen who both offer first line potential relatively cheap) and managed to clear out a ton of cap space without downgrading their roster much, if at all.
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They are now deeper, both in the NHL and in the AHL. They’ve got the defensive forward they’ve been missing, and they’ve made their blue-line far more mobile and better at moving the puck from the right side.
I don’t like paying replacement player Codi Ceci $4.5 million when Jake Gardiner is seemingly still available, but other than that, it’s hard to find fault with any of their moves.
The players leaving had no upside and were too expensive. They’ve replaced them with players who are cheap and have upside. They’ve filled their roster holes and made their team more flexible (in terms of both lineup construction and future transactions).
I think despite the loss of Gardiner, that overall, the Toronto Maple Leafs have a slightly better team than they had.
That might sound like faint praise, but when your team is icing a lineup featuring Matthews, Tavares, Nylander, Marner, Kadri, Johnsson, Kapanen Rielly, Muzzin, Gardiner, Dermott and Andersen there just isn’t that much room to get better (given it’s a salary cap league).
The real improvement on the Leafs will come in the form of internal improvement. Matthews, Marner, Nylander, Johnsson, Kapanen, and Dermott still haven’t hit their peak yet.
No significant player appears to be in line for a decline.
Plus, they’ve got Timothy Liljegren, Rasmus Sandin and Jeremy Bracco about to break into the league and play on dirt-cheap ELC deals.
The Leafs of today are slightly better than the Leafs of one month ago, and they remain a team that should enter the season as the favorites to win the 2020 Stanley Cup.