A Tribute to a Toronto Maple Leafs Great: Denis Malgin

The Toronto Maple Leafs traded Denis Malgin this week in exchange for Dryden Hunt.

There’s no secret that Denis Malgin was a Toronto Maple Leafs great.

Sorry, let me rephrase that. He was a Toronto Maple Leafs preseason great, lighting up the league against out-of-shape and AHLers in September and early October this year.

This was the second stint for Malgin with the Leafs and it basically went the same way the first one did. The undersized winger couldn’t score at the NHL-level and was ultimately traded away for a fourth-liner.

Instead of sticking with Malgin and hoping that he could produce some offense, Dubas made the right decision to send him packing for a player who can provide an impact, in a different way than scoring. Malgin is only useful if he’s scoring, so it’s better to acquire a player like Hunt who’s not going to score anyway, but he can at least play well defensively and play a shut-down fourth-line role.

When it comes to sports, we use the term “hate” a lot, and it has nothing to do with the person. I’m sure Malgin is a nice guy and his friends and family adore him, however he’s reached the tipping point of “sports hate” for me.

Toronto Maple Leafs and Denis Malgin

My “sports hate” to Malgin isn’t really fair to him because it’s more directed at Dubas and his initial reasoning for trading for Malgin.

Let’s take you back to February 19, 2020. We all feared that a pandemic was looming, but we didn’t know the extent. The pandemic was a terrible thing within our world, but something else terrible happened that day when Toronto traded Mason Marchment for Malgin.

Marchment was, for the most part, an unknown prospect who had a cup of coffee with the Leafs. However, for those die-hard fans (myself included), Marchment was a work-in-progress who had high potential.

The 6-foot-4, 210-pound forward had NHL-blood in him (his dad played 926 NHL games) and was continuing to get better every year with the Marlies. Sure, his stats weren’t improving at a crazy high-rate, like normal prospects, but his skating was getting immensely better and he had a skillset that most players in Toronto didn’t have.

He had great size and could play power-forward, which was something Toronto was missing.

The Leafs were built through speed and skill and because of that, they were particularly small. Marchment was the opposite of that, so in my opinion, I thought they would keep Marchment for awhile and try to get him into the NHL line-up full-time.

Instead, they shipped him to Florida for Malgin and the rest was history.

In the 2021-22 season, he had 18 goals and 47 points in 54 games and has nine goals and 19 points in 32 games this year, continuing to show that he’s a very valuable player.

Malgin on the other hand has two goals and four points in 31 games with the Leafs in the past two seasons and is now on the Colorado Avalanche.

Players like Malgin are what Dubas has continued to hang his hat on and it’s nice to see that he cut ties before things got worse. Hunt won’t score often but at least he’ll play a role that he’ll flourish in.

Kudos for Dubas for trading him now and understanding that it’s not working. However, it’ll take some time for me to get over the fact that Malgin was once traded for Marchment.