On Thursday, the Toronto Maple Leafs placed Nic Petan and Martin Marincin on waivers.
The Players had to clear waivers in order for the Toronto Maple Leafs to send them to the AHL to play for the Marlies.
The two players went unclaimed and will remain with the organization.
This is not particularly surprising, despite the fact that both Petan and Marincin are solid players who could help almost any team.
Toronto Maple Leafs Roster
The Leafs are trying to clear space to bring back Zach Hyman from the injured reserve.
Hyman tore up his knee last year in the first round playoff loss to the Boston Bruins, and had surgery over the offseason.
Hyman has been practicing recently and is almost ready to return. It is thought that he will return either this Saturday or sometime next week.
In order to get Hyman on the roster, the Leafs need to clear enough room to fit his $2.5 million dollar salary onto the team, which is currently maxed out.
One way to do this is to waive a few players in order to be able to send them to the Marlies. As explained in yesterday’s post about waivers, the Leafs are in a lucky situation because their AHL team plays in the same city.
Because of the close proximity of the Marlies, it’s not strictly necessary for the Leafs to have extra players to healthy scratch.
Should a player get injured, the Leafs can recall someone and have them in the game the next night without having to worry about travel, as long as the salary cap works out.
One thing the Leafs could do to set up such a situation is to waive Cody Ceci, banking on the fact that no one would take his $4.5 salary – this would give them the flexibility for at least a month to ship players in and out.
Trading Ceci is another option, but would probably require taking back at least some salary.
The most likely option is to also waive some combination of Jason Spezza, Nick Shore and Dymtro Timashov, although the latter two would probably get claimed.
Assuming they don’t want to risk losing Ceci, they’d have to at least waive and demote one of those three in order to get Hyman back into the lineup.
Of course, there’s always the option of a trade – Trevor Moore and Kasperi Kapanen are both likely too good for the fourth line, so one of them might get traded in order to make some room.
Either way, it will be interesting to see what moves the Toronto Maple Leafs make in the next couple of days. The good news is that the Leafs were able to sneak these two highly underrated players through waivers and will maintain their league best team depth.