How Will the Toronto Maple Leafs Replace Lost Talent?

The Toronto Maple Leafs signed several players this summer,  but the likes of Matt Murray, Nick Aube-Kubal and Calle Jarnkrok are not commensurate, at least in terms of name-recognition, with the  players they lost.

In fact, if you look around the league at various “what happened this summer” articles, you will notice a lot of people taking pleasure in writing off what the Toronto Maple Leafs did this summer.

How will the Leafs make up for the players they lost?

They can’t, seems to be the resounding answer.

But, as usually, the answer you hear the most is wrong.

The Toronto Maple Leafs Won’t Have Trouble Replacing What They Lost

The critics completely ignore the fact that the Leafs go bargain hunting every summer on purpose and by design.

Their philosophy is that the difference between expensive non-star players and replacement players is so small that you should put any money you can into stars and go cheap on everyone else.

It’s worked out better than expected, because even with the salary cap barely going up for four years (it went up $4.5 million dollars between 2017-18 and 18-19.   Since then, it’s gone up by just $3 million in  four seasons) the Toronto Maple Leafs have been among the NHL’s best teams the entire time.

The Leafs cap ideas work so well that they have now been copied by both the Colorado Avalanche and the Tampa Bay Lighting.

So the idea that they will have trouble losing out on Spezza, Mikheyev, Lyubushkin, and Kase,  is ridiculous..  The Leafs have been turning over the bottom third of their roster annually for several years now, and it is 100% proven beyond any possible hint of doubt that they can do it.

To say they can’t, or that this is even a slight risk, is to completely ignore history, as they have nearly a .700 points-percentage over the last three seasons, since Sheldon Keefe was hired, almost 200 games ago.

There is no room for Lyubushkin to play. He is OK, but he is among the very worst offensive players available in the NHL, so he should never earn beyond the league minimum, since unless he is basically perfect defensively, he has no way to help the team, so his mistakes are enormous when they happen.

Getting Giordano for half the cost of Lyubushkin more than makes up for this.  Not to mention that Brodie, Holl and Liljegren (the Leafs three righties) are significantly better than Lyubushkin.

Mikheyev is a nice player, but he’s the textbook example of the exact player you shouldn’t pay big money to.  A third line with Engvall-Kampf and either Aube-Kabel or Calle Jarnkrok in the place of Mikheyev isn’t going to be any worse or any better.  This move might be worth plus or minus half a win at most.  It’s barely going to matter, regardless.

As for Kase, he was a nice player, but he was injured so often that Kerfoot was the most common Tavares/Nylander left-winger, and Mikheyev was the most common Engvall/Kampf winger.  That makes him either a 4th liner or injured for the majority of the time. It also means he won’t be missed.

Same goes with Spezza.  Nice player, everyone loved him, but his actual contributions from the fourth line won’t be hard to replace.  His intangibles will be harder to replace than his actual contributions.  Unless you get very lucky, 4th liners are completely interchangeable and it barely matters.

The Leafs projected bottom six of Engvall-Kampf-Jarnkrok   Anderson-Gaudette-Aube Kubel – or whatever other Marlies/Simmonds/Clifford win jobs in camp, and that’s not much worse than what they had last year, and with Aube-Kubel’s potential, maybe better.

I’ve argued about the goalies a ton, so if you want to read about that, read it here.

Overall though, you can easily see that the Leafs aren’t going to miss what they lost.  That’s their thing and they are very good at doing it.