Filip Hallander #9
The Toronto Maple Leafs acquired Filip Hallander (and a first rounder) from the Pittsburgh Penguins in exchange for Kasperi Kapanen.
The trade may go down as one of the biggest heists in NHL history. That sounds like an exaggeration, but Kapanen is not a very good player. In his time with the Leafs, he had one good year, and two years where he was no more than a fourth liner. (Prior to the trade, we graded Kapanen’s year an “F”).
That the Leafs could swap an overpaid replacement player for huge financial savings, and (once the draft was over) two top prospects is still hard to believe. The Penguins will surely regret this trade, if they don’t already.
Hallander is ranked much higher on most of these rankings, but I prefer a high ceiling over a better chance to just make the league, which Hallander is a shoe-in to do. In fact, if he wasn’t on the league’s deepest team, he’d probably have a decent shot at an NHL job this year.
Like most Leafs prospects, the scouting reports suggest that Hallander is a smart player who drives puck possession. The experts seem to believe he’ll be a decent, if unspectacular, middle of the lineup player.
Think Ilya Mikheyev, maybe, if everything works out. Hallander was picked in the second round of the 2018 draft, and is an average sized, left-shooting centre. He is 20 years old.
A nice thing about picking up Hallander was that the Toronto Maple Leafs had already traded Sean Durzi (the player they picked instead of Hallander, just a couple spots before Pittsburgh drafted) to the Kings in the Jake Muzzin trade. This is significant only for the fact that the Leafs used two draft picks (2018 second, and 2020 first) to improve their team but were able to recoup them later at almost no cost.