3 Toronto Maple Leafs Who Will Likely Be Traded Before Deadline

Expect the Toronto Maple Leafs to make a big trade between now and the NHL Trade Deadline.

There aren’t too many holes in the Toronto Maple Leafs roster right now. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t need to upgrade.

When the playoffs start, the biggest thing that every eventual Stanley Cup winner has isn’t talent, it’s depth. Injuries happen and especially in hockey (more than any other sport), the elite players play through injury despite not being even close to 100 percent.

The best players never want to come out of the line-up, so even if you think your line-up is completely healthy because your best players are playing, it doesn’t always mean that. And if you have zero depth, you can’t risk taking any of those players out of the line-up to recover. Instead, you’re forced to play everyone and risk even more harm.

Toronto Maple Leafs Potential Trade Chips

Toronto has players on their third and fourth line who can jump into a top-six role and/or play more meaningful minutes and help the team score. Whether that’s Ondrej Kase, Ilya Mikheyev or Jason Spezza, most of the bottom-six can jump into the top-six if necessary.

It wouldn’t be ideal but they can sustain it for a few games.

The same can’t be said about their defensive core. T.J. Brodie and Morgan Rielly are legit top-four defenseman. while Jake Muzzin is half the time. Meanwhile, Travis Dermott and Justin Holl shouldn’t play more than 10 minutes per night, and Timothy Liljegren and Rasmus Sandin are still raw.

You’d prefer not to put Liljegren and Sandin in a bigger role in the playoffs this year and could instead use two more defenseman to join the roster.

As such, the team will have to trade a few assets to get that defenseman. Here are the three likely candidates to get traded.

No. 1: Nick Ritchie

Despite being a terrible signing by the Leafs this season and clearing waivers, there could be a team that finds trading for Ritchie useful.

It’ll more than likely be a bottom-feeder team like Arizona who would take a flyer on him, but his contract and previous stats could make him a valuable asset for a team.

Last season, Ritchie scored 15 goals and has a ton of size. If you looked at his stats alone and didn’t watch his game closely, you’d think that Ritchie would have been the perfect Hyman replacement on the first line for Toronto this year.

He’d create space for Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner and potentially score 20 goals by mistake. However, if you’ve watched every Leafs game this year, it’s clear it hasn’t worked and it’s clear that Ritchie should never play another game with this roster.

He’s slow, can’t score and takes the worst penalties ever. He’s a complete disaster, but at $2.5M for one more season and over 300 games of NHL experience, there’s definitely another NHL team out there that would trade for him.

Toronto would more than likely have to give up a high draft pick or prospect in order to ditch Ritchie, but that’s definitely worth it to see him play somewhere else.

No. 2: Pierre Engvall

If Engvall was five inches shorter, he probably wouldn’t have had such a long leash in the Toronto Maple Leafs organization.

However, the fact that he’s 6-foot-5 and 215 pounds makes him someone that you want to see succeed.

Engvall is essentially like Subway. It’s fine, it’s not that expensive and you’ll eat it if there’s nothing else available and you’re in a rush. However, you’re not looking forward to it and going there on your birthday like a steak house.

His $1.25M contract isn’t an issue, but it kind of is for the Leafs. For $750K, you may as well just put Joey Anderson on the fourth line. He’s a lot smaller, but he’s chippy, can skate and can provide the same type of value for Engvall but for almost half of the price.

In a fourth line role, especially on a cap-strapped team, you don’t want to pay anyone over $1M. As such, shedding Engvall’s contract would be ideal and it wouldn’t be that hard to trade him.