Toronto Maple Leafs Win Free Agency By Losing Everyone

The Toronto Maple Leafs had a great weekend, mostly due to the players who left and not the players they signed.

The best things that happened to the Toronto Maple was the players who left.

Ryan O’Reilly four years for $4.5 million is a horrible deal for a near 33 year-old who has been under 50% in each of the last two playoff seasons.

The Luke Schenn deal is in competition for the worst deal in NHL history. This old, replacement level player signed for three years and double his value.

Michael Bunting was great for 900K. At $4.5 x 3 you can keep him.

One year and $3.5 million for Kerfoot is actually decent, but the Leafs needed to move on.

Noel Acciari for $2 million is a million too much and three years is two years too long.

Justin Holl for three years at $3.4 is terrible.

All of these things were positives for the Leafs.  All of these players can be replaced with cheaper players because non are stars.  The fact that each of them (other than Kerfoot) signed for term is crazy, but it makes other teams worse while the Leafs improve their salary cap situation.

Brad Treliving should be sending Barry Trotz in Nashville a Rolex or a new car or something for saving him from himself.

As for who the Leafs signed….

Toronto Maple Leafs Win By Losing

John Klingberg and Max Domi are pretty much crap.

You could likely get a better AHL player with more upside at the league minimum who helps you just as much.

However, for one-year deals they could work out.  They likely won’t,  but you can move these deals if they don’t, so there is relatively no risk.

If for whatever reason either player re-captures their former games you’re laughing.

As for Tyler Bertuzzi, it’s more complicated.

He’s seems to be the perfect fit and player for the Leafs.  A power-forward who can play in the top six and make the Leafs tougher to play against, and give them more dirty goals.

He’s overrated though, as fans probably don’t realize that Michael Bunting is actually better.   Still, take the one-year deal and the upside and the power game and I think I’d rather Bertuzzi next year than Bunting.

But this is indisputable: There is no way that Bertuzzi on this contract makes the Leafs better than Bunting did for 900K.   The Leafs got worse.

But they got better by getting worse, because their cap situation today is much better than we had any right to expect heading into this weekend.

The problem with Bertuzzi is his character – he has none.  He is the ONLY NHL player who wouldn’t get vaccinated, choosing to hurt his team because he was tricked by the anti-science people.

Whatever your views on vaccines, the rest of his team was willing to take a risk for society, and he wasn’t.  In our personal lives, that’s our business.  But in a league obsessed with character to the point of cliche, it’s worth pointing out that Tyler Bertuzzi doesn’t seem to have any.

Still, I am not in the room and I try not to care about that stuff.  If he can help the Toronto Maple Leafs, I’m all for it.  I just think it’s worth pointing out that if character is as important as the NHL makes it out to be, this might not be as good of a move as people think.

I like what the Toronto Maple Leafs did in free-agency – they let other teams sign all their players to long-term deals while brining in only low-risk players on one-year deals.  They are worse today than they were at the end of the season, but still have all summer to improve.