Toronto Maple Leafs Have Too Many Good Forwards

The Toronto Maple Leafs have way too many good forwards right now and that’s not the recipe to win a Stanley Cup.

Although it’s great to have a lot of goal scorers, history would suggest that if the Toronto Maple Leafs continue to operate this way, they will not have playoff success, but what else is new?

Last season, the Leafs had four 30-plus goal-scorers, including two players who scored 40-plus. Any team in the NHL would love to have Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander and John Tavares, but you really don’t need all four of them to win a Stanley Cup.

As previously mentioned, all four are fantastic talents, but getting rid of one, if not two, would clearly help the rest of the team.

We all know that no team had ever won a Stanley Cup with a $10M-plus player until this year, but you’d be shocked to know that not many team’s win a championship with a 40-goal scorer, let alone two.

Since the NHL Lockout, there have only been five Stanley Cup winners who have had a 40-goal scorer on their roster, but guess who those players were.

Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby, Henrik Zetterberg, Martin St. Louis and Eric Staal were all 40-goal scorers when their team won the Stanley Cup and all five of those players are future Hockey Hall of Fame players, so obviously their team had success.

Toronto Maple Leafs Have Too Many Good Forwards

When you think about it, you shouldn’t be too shocked to think that team’s who have more balance win more often than that. For example, the Leafs are so top-heavy that their best players need to be their best players every night in order for them to have success.

Not only that, but by having so much money invested into offense, it halters their defense and goaltending. If you were to take Tavares and Nylander out of this line-up and used their $17M to help the defensive-group and goaltending, this team would be 10 times better and they wouldn’t be sacrificing much offense.

With the addition of Tyler Bertuzzi, the Leafs would still have three 30-goal scorers on their roster, even without Nylander and Tavares, so the offense is good enough. Toronto could add two top-pairing defenseman for the price of Nylander/Tavares, but instead they continue to operate that offense is superior than defense.

You can outscore your opponent all-day during the regular season and come back from a 4-1 deficit in December, but in the playoffs, it’s a different animal. You need to win 2-1 games and be better defensively than the opposition and it’s one reason why the Leafs have continued to falter in the playoffs.

If Brad Treliving really wants to put a stamp on this roster, he needs to trade one or two of the core-four and focus on defense. Offense is sexy but defense wins championships and the Leafs are so close to being a legitimate Stanley Cup contender.

Hopefully Treliving figures that out quickly before the team is left without any star talent.