The Hard Truth About the Toronto Maple Leafs Blue-Line

The solution to the Toronto Maple Leafs’ defensive woes may be simpler than it appears.

Ask any Toronto Maple Leafs fan their opinion on the area in which the team needs to improve the most, the answer will invariably be on defense.

More often than not, the answer is phrased in ways like “they need a right-handed defenseman, someone defensively-minded who can play with Rielly.” And that’s a very valid  point-of-view, Morgan Rielly has never had a truly elite partner who allows him to just play his game and earn Norris Trophy nominations like we all know he can.

But what if I told you that solving the Leafs’ defensive problems was a lot more simple than that?

Toronto Maple Leafs Blue-Line

The Toronto Maple Leafs don’t need an elite, top-of-the-line right-handed defenseman (or multiple defensemen depending on who you ask), they simply need to sign or otherwise acquire good (not necessarily great) defensemen, regardless of handedness.

“But, they’re so weak on the right side and they have no one shooting right” you might say. To that, I reply, deprogram your brains and unlearn everything Mike Babcock jammed in there over the course of the last three or four years. Remember that this is the coach who complained when Muzzin was acquired and routinely deployed a Jake Gardiner/Nikita Zaitsev pairing, so maybe he shouldn’t be your go-to source of knowledge on how to deploy pairings?

The point I’m getting to is this: handedness is incredibly overrated. Don’t believe me? Look no further than three of the four remaining playoff teams. Vegas, Dallas, and the Islanders all routinely deploy left-handed defensemen on the right side, and in some cases, like Shea Theodore and Nate Schmidt for the Golden Knights and Miro Heiskanen with Dallas, they’re among the best defensemen on their respective teams, despite the “disadvantage” of playing on their off-side.

Tampa is the only remaining team that deploys an even split between left and right shots, and controversial as this may be, none of their right-shots are elite. The quality of Cernak, Schenn, Bogosian, and Shattenkirk as players is much lower than that of their defensive partners in Hedman, Sergachev and McDonagh, but despite that, Tampa is an elite team, those left-handed defensemen pull the quality of their partner’s play up, incredibly similar to how Jake Muzzin can make Justin Holl, or before him, Nikita Zaitsev, look like a competent option in the top-4.

The Toronto Maple Leafs organization has shown in the recent past that they don’t put as much stock into the value of handedness as much as certain former coaches do. Acquiring Jake Muzzin when they did, signing Ron Hainsey to play with Rielly, and making repeated mention of Travis Dermott’s ability to play the right-side are all evidence of this fact. Let go of the narrative that teams NEED right-handed defensemen in order to succeed, and embrace the idea of getting good players who make smart defensive plays regardless of the way they hold their stick.

Maybe Rasmus Sandin is the right-side defenseman that the Leafs fanbase has been clamoring for, we’ll never know unless they try it.

So in short, the simple answer to solving the Toronto Maple Leafs problems is to go after the best available players and and not worry about which way they shoot.