The Toronto Maple Leafs are an original six franchise who has the second-most Stanley Cup in NHL history.
If you say it like that, the Toronto Maple Leafs sound like quite the franchise, and to be honest, it’s a pretty misleading way to describe them. More accurate would be to say that the Leafs are a team that hasn’t won the Stanley Cup since the NHL expanded beyond six teams.
In this time the Leafs haven’t even made the Finals, something even the newest team has done. In fact, the Leafs haven’t won a major award or won a scoring or goal scoring title since the NHL expanded.
Still, as bad as that is, the positive side of the coin is that winning would be more meaningful to the Leafs and their fans than any other team in professional sports. Today’s team is one of the best in the NHL, and hopefully the Toronto Maple Leafs will finally pay back sports’ most dedicated fans.
With all that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to give an update on the franchise’s all time scoring leaders, using the wonderful site quanthockey.com.
Toronto Maple Leafs All-Time Scoring List
As I am sure everyone reading this knows, the Toronto Maple Leafs all-time leading scorer is the undisputed best player in franchise history, Mats Sundin. Sundin played 981 in the blue and white and scored 987 points. The point per game achievement is even more impressive when you remember that Sundin played through the lowest scoring era in NHL history and finished out the highest scoring era while still in Quebec.
It is sort of ironic that the Leafs had three first rounders in the 1989 draft and screwed every one of them up, but in the end, the top pick in the draft (taken by Quebec) ended up their best player of all time.
The highest scoring active player on the Leafs all-time list is Phil Kessel, who comes in 20th. Tyler Bozak (!) is 24th (who knew?) and Nazem Kadri is 25th, while James van Riemsdyk is 28th.
The highest scoring current member of the Leafs is Mitch Marner, who has 291 points in 300 games, and would have passed JVR (and Brian McCabe) had the last 12 games of last season not been cancelled.
Following Marner is Matthews with 285 and Morgan Rielly with 270. Surprisingly, Alexei Ponikarovsky is ranked 50th, which is information I thought you should have.
This season, 100 points from Marner would vault him all the way to 22nd, just three points behind Kessel in about 60 less games. Matthews is more or less in the same spot. William Nylander is currently ranked 67th and should pretty easily move into the top 50 this season.
Nylander already has more points than Dave Andreychuck, Sergei Berezin, Russ Courtnall, Mikhail Grabovski and Gary Roberts. Zach Hyman is ranked 106, and John Tavares is ranked 110. It’s not impossible that Tavares cracks the top 50 this year, but he’d need more than 100 points to do it.
It will likely take another three seasons, but both Marner and Matthews will eventually crack the Toronto Maple Leafs top 10 list.