3 Toronto Maple Leafs Who Could Get Traded Before Regular Season
No 3: Alex Kerfoot
If the Leafs have Nick Ritchie and Michael Bunting as the top two left-wingers, and they think that Ilya Mikheyev can do a similar job beside David Kamp and Ondrej Kase for half the price as Alex Kerfoot, it may mean the end to Kerfoot’s career in Toronto.
In terms of trade assets, Kerfoot is your most logical choice. At $3.5M, that’s a big contract to have playing a shutdown role on the team’s third line. If Toronto thinks that Mikheyev can replace Kerfoot there and save $2M, trading Kerfoot makes a lot of sense.
The Leafs blue-line could use an upgrade and one way to solve that is to trade Kerfoot for a defenseman. Rasmus Sandin and Travis Dermott are a fine third-pair, but Sandin and Justin Holl would be even better.
You’re not going to get a top-four defenseman by trading Kerfoot straight up, but you could be packaging him with a prospect and first or second-round draft pick.
Toronto should be one of the top-scoring teams in the NHL again, but they would benefit tremendously by beefing up their defense-core. If one defenseman gets injured, they’re screwed, so they need as much depth as possible.
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Kerfoot could be that trade-piece to make this team better, so it wouldn’t be shocking if it happened before the regular season starts.