Toronto Maple Leafs Have Obvious, Easy Expansion Draft Decision

The Toronto Maple Leafs will have lose a good player in the expansion draft, but the decision on who to protect is actually pretty easy.

As you probably know, the Toronto Maple Leafs can protect either four defenseman and four forwards, or you can expose a top-four defenseman and keep three extra forwards.

In both cases the Leafs can protect Jack Campbell and since Freddie Andersen is a UFA he doesn’t matter.

The other options are to pay the Kraken not to take anyone you care about, or to trade all the players you think they might take and then rent out your left-over protection spots to other teams.  Assuming the Leafs do neither of these things, their decision is pretty easy.

Toronto Maple Leafs and the Expansion Draft

There are three players on the Leafs who will be attractive to the new expansion team: Travis Dermott, Justin Holl and Alex Kerfoot.

The player to keep here should be a no-brainer, but this is Leafs Nation were talking about, so almost everything I see is about the Leafs protecting Holl.

That would be a ridiculous move.

As a cheap, right-handed top-four defenseman, Justin Holl should be able to bring back a pretty nice asset.  He is too valuable to lose for nothing, and the Leafs have too many defenseman pushing for minutes to continue to use him in the role he was in last year.

Alex Kerfoot is a nice player and I like him, but the Leafs could probably use his cap hit more effectively at this point.  Again, it would make more sense to trade him now before losing him for nothing, but the only thing that really matters is that they don’t give away Travis Dermott.

As you can see from the Tweet above  courtesy @Jfresh and his player cards, Travis Dermott is an elite defender, who consistently crushes his third-pairing role.  And yes, Holl plays tougher minutes, but he also plays with much better teammates.

Since Dermott barely scores, he will never cost very much money.  He can be re-signed right now on a long-term deal that would likely be extremely team-friendly.  How can you part with a defensively elite 24 year old defenseman?

You can’t.

Travis Dermott is the only potentially exposed Toronto Maple Leafs player that it actually matters if they keep.  Travis Dermott is a player who is far more valuable than he seems to the average fan.  Not many defenseman do as well as he does in a third-pairing role, and he could easily go play 22 minutes a night on the Kraken and turn into their version of Shea Theodore (though Dermott isn’t quite that good, it’s still an apt comparison).

The Toronto Maple Leafs success in the expansion draft will be measured by only one thing: do they retain Travis Dermott?  If the answer is yes, then they will have succeeded, regardless of which player they lose.