Toronto Maple Leafs: The Final Assessment of the Summer

The Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t played a game in nearly four months.

Though we’ve been without hockey for a while now, the off-season tends to be at least somewhat action packed, and the Toronto Maple Leafs made a ton of moves since they lost to the Bruins back in May.

From blockbuster trades to depth signings, the Leafs have been incredibly busy.

They’ve turned over more than a third of their roster since they last played a game.

Toronto Maple Leafs Off-Season

The Leafs still haven’t signed Mitch Marner, but it doesn’t really matter. He isn’t getting traded.  There certainly won’t be an offer-sheet.  The eventual outcome is that he signs with the Leafs.

Will it be soon or will we have to go through another couple months of boring talk about it?  Since the eventual outcome is going to be that he plays for the Leafs,  there’s no point worry about it.

Some have been critical of the Leafs for not getting it done yet, but I don’t know anyone would blame the team, the only thing they could have done differently so far is cave to so over-the-top-I-can’t-believe-they’re-real demands of his agent.

But aside from Marner, everything went perfectly.

They traded a first round pick to get out of the Marleau deal.  Anyone who thinks that was too much to pay has been ignoring the stats and doesn’t actually understand how bad Marleau was last year.

They let Hainsey walk, and they accepted Cody Ceci the cost to get rid of two players they would have probably paid more to get rid of in Connor Brown and Nikita Zaitsev.

Brown doesn’t do anything you can’t get or half the price (Spezza, Shore, Wilson) and Marleau, Zaitsev and Hainsey all make the team better by leaving.

The fact that they got a possibly useful asset in exchange for any of these guys is fantastic.

Their first round pick was gone, but they chose the youngest eligible player in the draft, who, if he was three days older, would likely have been a high first next season.

They there was the Kadri trade.  As much as I loved Kadri, he took two suspensions in back-to-back first rounds, both of which probably cost his team from moving on.

A player can maybe survive one Ray Finkle situation.  Not two.

Kadri moving was inevitable, and the return is fantastic.  The Leafs get the defensively elite forward and the right-handed top pairing defenseman they were missing.

They traded their problem child and a guy who is good, not great, (Rosen) for basically the only two pieces missing from their roster.

Can’t beat that.

Now are the Toronto Maple Leafs any better?

That would depend on whether or not they bring back Jake Gardiner.  They lost two impact players – Kadri and Gardiner – and brought back two slightly worse (but better fitting) impact players in Kerfoot and Barrie.

The only real improvement comes from getting rid of Hainsey and Marleau.  Sure, they’re deeper, but hockey games aren’t really won with depth in the NHL where there is hardly any difference between anyone’s bottom-of-the-lineup-players.

The Leafs are counting on internal improvement (Dermott, Marner, Matthews, Nylander, Johnsson, Kapanen) and a lack of actively bad players (Marleau, Hainsey) to improve their team.

That might not sound like much, but they were already pretty damned good, and in a salary cap league, it’s hard to get that much better.

The caveat here is that if they bring back Gardiner, then Tyson Barrie becomes an absolutely huge addition.

Either way, it’s hard to find fault with anything they did this off-season.

There’s one out in the ninth inning and Kyle Dubas is pitching a perfect game.  All he’s got to do is sign Marner and Gardiner to close it out.