Top 3 Draft Picks That Never Played for the Toronto Maple Leafs
By Luke Ryan
Often times teams will draft a player and trade him before he plays for them – and there’s 3 particular play names that stand out for the Toronto Maple Leafs who they drafted but never played.
It really goes without saying that there’s no judging what a player’s development trajectory looks like, so the Toronto Maple Leafs are certainly not the only team to commit this faux pas.
Given the sheer fact that the Toronto Maple Leafs are an Original Six team, they are statistically among the group most likely to have drafted players and let them slip from their grasps, given they’ve been drafting since the NHL Amateur Draft was formally established back in 1963.
However, when you look through the team’s drafting history, you come across a significant number of players that make it to the NHL and at least end up wearing the Toronto Maple Leafs jersey on a few occasions.
Some of those players are traded early in their career after never cracking the Toronto Maple Leafs roster, before looping back at a much later stage; Brad Boyes being a recent example.
However, the challenge is that sometimes you either have to trade a prospect early in their trajectory and this ends up biting you or there isn’t the roster space or push from the General Manager to opt towards youth.
Both of these stand in the way of making the big league when you’re a young prospect in the system. Let’s also not forget that these young players are always facing internal competition.
In an ideal world, the Toronto Maple Leafs would be able to give every single draft pick at the very least a try-out in the NHL; this is absolutely never going to happen though.
As a result, sometimes the team will decide they prefer one player over another and allow the other to be traded, walk to free agency or otherwise depart the club.
The regret on these is seldom immediate either; in fact it’s fair to say there’s been times where the mistake of trading a player isn’t realized until years afterwards.
Still, there’s always that slight bitter taste left in the mouth when you see players establish themselves as useful players elsewhere when you know they could’ve been playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs from the start.