Toronto Maple Leafs Bench Future Star, But Not for His Play

The Toronto Maple Leafs have shut down Rasmus Sandin for the remainder of the regular season.

Taking Sandin’s place in last night’s Toronto Maple Leafs vs Montreal Canadiens Hockey Night in Canada Season Finale was Ben Hutton, which would seem like a crazy move if made for hockey reasons.

Sandin hasn’t been benched for his play, however.  The Leafs had to shut him down for salary cap reasons.

Basically, the Leafs have gone this entire season right up against the cap limit, and while the machinations of Pridham and Dubas are legendary among the nerdiest of hockey fans, the upshot is that they have used LTIR, the taxi squad, waiver wire and team injuries to squeeze every last dollars they can use to make ice the best team possible.

A casualty in these manipulations is the final three games of Sandin’s season – though we should expect him to start in the playoffs.

Toronto Maple Leafs and Rasmus Sandin

As Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe made abundantly clear, this isn’t a benching related to Sandin’s play.  The Leafs have the playoffs (and though this was written prior to last night’s game, one assumes the division as well) locked up and so it’s not going to hurt them to play Ben Hutton for three games.

Sandin has, in fact, established himself as one of the Leafs better players.  Though he’s played just nine games this year, he has made Bogosian’s injury into a blessing in disguise, because it forced the team to use a player who then promptly made it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would be dumb not to play him (in games that matter, obviously).

The stupidity of NHL culture will likely dictate that the Leafs play Bogosian when he’s back from injury, despite the fact that even while uninjured and not rusty from sitting out a month he is their seventh best defenseman.

As is standard, Travis Dermott absolutely crushed third pairing minutes again this year, putting up elite defensive numbers.  He is better than Bogosian in every way, except for hitting and being tough and large.  Sadly, the Leafs will likely sit either Sandin or Dermott in favor of Bogosian even though it’s the wrong move.

As for Sandin, he posted a 52% Corsi, 54% shots-for, 55% expected goals and an incredible 80% goals-for.   OK, that last one is  just lucky, but it’s still awesome that the Leafs outscored the opposition 8 to 2 with Sandin on the ice this year. (naturalstattrick.com)

The thing about Sandin is that as soon as he gets the ice time to prove it, he’s likely going to be the Leafs second best defenseman.  No offense to Muzzin or Brodie – they’re both elite players – but Sandin is going to be a star.  Expect these to be the last games he ever sits out while healthy.