The Toronto Maple Leafs Don’t (Yet) Have a Pick Tonight

The Toronto Maple Leafs are without a draft pick in the first round of tonight’s NHL Entry Draft.

The first round of the draft is tonight, and the Toronto Maple Leafs will be sitting it out, barring a last minute trade.

The Leafs traded their pick – 25th overall – to the Columbus Blue Jackets in exchange for Nick Foligno.  It was a trade that didn’t work out, but which was a perfectly reasonable move to make at the time.

While it is true that the Leafs collapsed in the first round and blew a 3-1 lead, thus rendering the draft pick far preferable to Nick Foligno, the fact is that any team that wins their division and doesn’t use everything in their arsenal to advance the team would be a joke.

Toronto Maple Leafs Got No Picks!

I’d rather be a team that ends up regretting the pick I traded than having not tried at all.  This isn’t to say Foligno was even the right player or that the price was reasonable.  It’s not a player I would have added, but at the same time, trading your first round pick for immediate help when you win your division is the right move every time.

Additional, if a freak injury two minutes into the series doesn’t take John Tavares out of commission, Nick Foligno returns healthy and the Leafs trounce the Jets, thus setting off a chain of events that sees us praising the Foligno trade.

I don’t agree with people who are critical of the Leafs salary cap strategy, but I understand why they are and I respect their stance.  I don’t agree with people who think the Leafs need to be tougher or harder to play against, but I know why they think that and I respect it.  As long as both parties are reasonable, two people can disagree diametrically and neither one of them is wrong or an idiot.  There are more things than are dreamt and all that.

But not every argument is like that.  Sometimes people are just flat out wrong.  The earth isn’t flat and you don’t need to respect anyone who says it is when you talk about the shape of planets.  A hockey version of this would be using hindsight to criticize trading your first round pick when you are in contention for a Stanley Cup. This is a specious and unreasonable argument.  If a move is the right move at the time, the results are irrelevant.  There is no argument that can be made against it. It is the right move, end of story.

Anyways, the Leafs don’t have a pick. Columbus has three.  Buffalo picks first, Seattle second, and no Canadian team picks until the Canucks at nine.  Detroit has two picks, so does Minnesota and New Jersey.  

This will likely be a weird draft, because there just wasn’t as many games or as many opportunities for teams to see players in the games that did get played, due to the pandemic.  The Leafs only have three picks, barring trades, but the thing is, if you ever had a draft where you didn’t care you were low on picks, it’s probably this one.

Besides, the Leafs had 12 picks last year and they kept them specifically so that they could afford to spend the picks this year.