Toronto Maple Leafs: Forget Depth, Look at the High Ceilings

The Toronto Maple Leafs – if rumors  are correct – could be opening training camp within a month.

When you factor in the sheer numbers or NHL players the Toronto Maple Leafs have available to them, it becomes apparent that training camp is going to be quite fascinating.  But while much has been made of the Leafs depth, their real advantage comes from the high ceilings of their depth players.

On forward, the Leafs have seven returning players to their top nine (Nylander, Matthews, Tavares, Marner, Kerfoot, Hyman and Mikheyev), and then an absurd amount of competition for the bottom five roster spots.

Competing for these spots: Nick Robertson, Alex Barabanov, Pierre Engvall, Jason Spezza, Joe Thornton, Wayne Simmonds, Jimmy Vesey, Travis Boyd, Joey Anderson, Denis Malgin, Yegor Korshkov, Nic Petan, Adam Brooks and Kenny Agostino.

On defense, you’ve got a similar situation where there are at least nine or ten options (Rielly, Muzzin, Brodie, Holl, Sandin, Dermott, Liljegren, Lehtonen, Bogosian, Rosen, Marincin) and all of them can play a perfectly adequate 3rd pairing role.

The Leafs are hoping that job competition will increase the chances of one or more of these players playing beyond expectations and hitting their ceilings instead of hovering around their floors.

Toronto Maple Leafs and the Case of High Potential

Here are a couple quick examples of what I mean:

Timothy Liljegren is one of the better defensemen in the AHL, and if the Leafs were forced to play him 15 minutes per night right now, as their #6, I think he’d be, at worst, OK.  He certainly wouldn’t be close to being the worst player in the NHL getting regular ice time.

But, given his pedigree, talent, career success and year over year growth, it’s not impossible that he just comes out of nowhere in training camp, demands a job and ends up on the top pairing by February.   I mean, its incredibly unlikely, but he’s a fairly high ceiling player and things like this do occasionally happen.

It’s not completely out of the question that Nick Robertson scores 30 goals and plays almost every minute John Tavares does, that Sandin is the Leafs best defenseman by the playoffs, that Mikheyev has another level or that Barabanov is Mikheyev part 2.

What if Hyman’s goal scoring last year wasn’t a fluke? What if Morgan Rielly takes that one final step towards truly being an elite player? what if Matthews scores 60, Marner becomes a complete player or Justin Holl is the real deal?

What if Wayne Simmonds or Joe Thornton find the fountain of youth?

The most likely high-ceiling lottery ticket the Leafs hold is Mikko Lehtonen. After last year’s 49 points in 60 games, he earned the KHL version of the Norris Trophy and was deemed the best defenseman not in the NHL.  This year he’s putting up a point per game.

Will he transition to the NHL and steal someone’s job?  I don’t know.

But the point here is that the Leafs didn’t just stock up on depth, they brought in players who have the capability to be stars.  Any one of these guys going off is unlikely, but say you cobbled together 10 of them?

The Toronto Maple Leafs finished 8th overall under Keefe last year with almost nothing going right for them. What happens when that’s the baseline, and they get two or three surprise star-level seasons from players nowhere near their core?

It’s been proven a beyond any shadow of a doubt that NHL results are driven by elite players.  A team with more elite players and less depth will be heavily favored to beat a deeper team with less stars.  That is a fact.  The Leafs know this and their entire strategy for team building is predicated on this fact.

The Toronto Maple Leafs already have one of the highest total amounts of elite players in the NHL, and if they hit on a couple of their depth players they are going to be a scary team to play against.