Top 10 Toronto Maple Leafs Misses: 2010s Edition

Over the past decade, the Toronto Maple Leafs have done a tremendous job at scouting and developing through the NHL Entry Draft.

If you look at their current roster, besides John Tavares, the Toronto Maple Leafs drafted their four best players.

Morgan Rielly, Mitch Marner, William Nylander and Auston Matthews were all drafted by the team with top-10 picks since 2012.

You may think, so what? How hard could it be to draft talent like this when you have one of the best picks in the draft?

Well, as we’ve seen over the previous three parts of this series, it’s a lot harder than it looks.

Hindsight will always be 20/20 because no matter how good a player turns out, there’s always an alternate universe where maybe you could have selected a player that’s better suited for your current roster.

For example, you may have selected one of the most talented offensive players in the draft, but would a defenseman have been better for the overall team, compared to a flashy offensive superstar?

These are a number of different ‘what-if’s’ that go on after the NHL Entry Draft and it’s been a fun experiment to understand what players could have been Maple Leafs if things had gone differently.

Here is the criteria again to showcase exactly what a “miss” is defined as.

• The player can only be a “miss” if another team selected that individual within five picks of the Toronto Maple Leafs draft pick.

Enjoy the fourth and final part of these series, as we look at the top 10 draft misses from the 2010s.