Toronto Maple Leafs: 4 Questions for Sheldon Keefe In Training Camp

Keeping Everyone Happy

If Sheldon Keefe gets this one wrong, it could spell disaster for the Toronto Maple Leafs this season, and already, there is some trouble brewing.

First of all, the Toronto Maple Leafs need to win this year, and they need to win a lot. That means playing Matthews, Marner, Tavares, Nylander, Rielly, Muzzin and Brodie a lot. They are comfortably Toronto’s best players, if Keefe wants to win, he’ll need to ride them.

Toronto’s talent is concentrated on a few players (much to the chagrin of a lot of fans) but it takes far more than that to run a successful hockey club.

Players like Jason Spezza, Wayne Simmonds and to an extent Alexander Kerfoot know they are role players already. Newcomers Nick Ritchie and Michael Bunting will likely benefit the most alongside the top two lines, but keeping the likes of David Kampf and Ondrej Kase happy will be more of a task.

The most difficult to keep happy is surely Ilya Mikheyev who handed in a transfer request in the summer that was promptly denied.

Ironically, for all the holes that the team had going in to the season, there aren’t many roles available. It seems counter intuitive but it’s true. The penalty kill will get Kampf as a new face, but otherwise you can expect Keefe will keep Kerfoot, Marner and Mikheyev in those roles.

The space on the Matthews wing seems to already have been filled by Ritchie, while Campbell will not want to take a backup role now he has tasted what it’s like to be starter, and Mrazek certainly wont.

There is always a level of juggling that needs to be done on hockey teams, but with so many known and just as many unknown quantities on this Toronto Maple Leafs team, Sheldon Keefe will have to make sure the chemistry in the locker room doesn’t get in the way of the victories, and vice-versa.