Toronto Maple Leafs Need to Be Careful Not to Shut Out Rookies

The Toronto Maple Leafs could most likely dress one of the most boring, low-event, defensive bottom-six in the history of the NHL, if they wanted to.

The Toronto Maple Leafs brought in Cale Jarnkrok to compliment David Kampf and Pierre Engvall, then they brought in Zac Aston-Reese, Nicholas Aube-Kubal, and Adam Gaudette to compete for jobs with Kyle Clifford, Wayne Simmonds, Joey Anderson and Denis Malgin. 

Those 10 players are all NHL players of various upsides, none of them high.  But there are a lot of competent NHL players in this group, but I think the Leafs would be making a massive mistake if these are the only players who make the roster this year.

Toronto Maple Leafs Need Upside

There is a lot of potential advantage to having a purely defensive line that can post positive expected results when playing other team’s top lines at home, and when starting a high percentage of their shifts in the defensive zone.

If you have a pure defensive line, and it is successful like last year’s Kampf/Engvall duo, it allows you to get your top lines away from other team’s top lines and can be a real advantage.  A line that can actually pull this off is extremely valuable.

But if your 3rd line has no offense, I think the type of fourth line will compliment it best is a line of explosive and hungry  players with high upsides.

Aston-Reese is a nice player, but unless Engvall is off that defensive line, there is no where for him to play because it would be counter productive to dress two lines with no upside.  If the entire bottom-six is an offense-free dead-zone, then there is no way to recover when the defense isn’t perfect.

ZAR with Aube-Kubal and Gaudette would be a perfectly fine fourth line, and in the NHL, the difference between having the best and worst fourth lines probably isn’t even worth a single win over the entire season.

That is, unless you get lucky and you have a high upside prospect who is just way too good for a normal fourth line role.   Since there isn’t that much downside to having the worst fourth line in hockey, it’s the perfect spot to take risks.

The Leafs have already been innovative in this by using Jason Spezza and building a sort of secret scoring line with their fourth line.  It’s not long ago that the idea of using a finesse player on the fourth line would have been laughed at.

So while I think Gaudette and Aubel-Kubal and Aston-Reese are all perfectly fine players, I don’t think any more than one of them can make the team, assuming they still plan to play Kampf in a 3rd line role.  You need upside, and that means Nick Robertson, Roni Hirvonen, Pontus Holmberg, Nick Aburzzese, Alex Steeves and Ty Voight need to have the chance to make this roster.

A “kid line” won’t hurt you in a limited role, since NHL fourth lines are generally just place-holders until the stars come back out, but it does offer higher upside and thus greater reward than playing it safe.