The Toronto Maple Leafs are going to have their most interesting training camp in recent memory when the players hit the ice next month.
In recent years, the Toronto Maple Leafs roster hasn’t had many interesting camp battles, because as a contending team, their roster was more or less set.
Last year, they signed a bunch of players to league minimum deals, but due to the signing of a few legendary players, Covid Protocols, the Taxi Squad, waiver rules, and the uncertainty of the AHL Schedule, the team didn’t really have the kind of battles that you would expect from a roster filled with borderline players at the lower end.
This year should be different because there is still the possibility that one or both of Ilya Mikheyev and Alexander Kerfoot could end being traded, and thus leave competition for roster spots wide open. Even if both return, the Leafs camp will feature a ton of competition as the likes of Michael Bunting, Nick Ritchie, Nick Robertson, Alex Kerfoot, and Ondrej Kase compete for a top six role.
For those who don’t make the cut there, the bottom six will also feature a ton of additional competition in the form of Mikheyev, Spezza, Engvall, Joey Andersen, Josh Ho-Sang , David Kampf, Wayne Simmonds, Adam Brooks, Kurtis Gabriel and maybe even Alex Galchenyuk.
This should be awesome to behold, but I’d like to see the Leafs add one more player.
The Toronto Maple Leafs and Nikita Gusev
Gusev is a 29 year old winger who played the majority of his prime years in the KHL.
In his last year in the KHL, Gusev scored 82 points in 62 games, absolutely running away with the league scoring title.
He then came to New Jersey and posted a decent enough 44 points in 66 games as an over-aged NHL rookie. The Devils were a brutal team that year, but Gusev was a bright spot.
Unfortunately, last season was a complete disaster for him. He scored 5 points in 20 games and Jersey then traded him to FLA.
Now he hasn’t got an NHL contract and who knows if he’ll go back to the KHL or eventually latch on with another team. That team should be the Toronto Maple Leafs.
A cursory look into Gusev’s stats paint a pretty clear picture of bad luck: Despite a 53% Corsi rating, Gusev had a PDO under 900 (incredible) and New Jersey shot under 2% while Gusev was on the ice, and the Devil’s goalies stopped only 87.72% of shots when he played. (stats naturalstatrick.com).
Any Leafs fan can tell you how offense-only wingers fare on bad teams with no goaltending.
Moving to Florida , Gusev got into 11 games, played mostly with Sasha Barkov and put up great numbers. Even with a shooting percentage that remained below 4%, he still put up 5 points in 11 games to go along with dynamite underlying numbers.
This is the exact player the Toronto Maple Leafs should offer a cheap contract to. Put him on a line with either of your two superstar pairings and you’ve got a third wheel who is capable of point per game production for almost no money.
This is a no brainer if ever there was one.