The Toronto Maple Leafs blue-line is going to be extremely bad this season.
The summer has been a rough one for new Toronto Maple Leafs GM Brad Treliving because nothing he’s really done – outside of signing Tyler Bertuzzi and putting Matt Murray on the LTIR – has been good.
The blue-line is a mess, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to make it better given the salary cap situation (which 100% on Treliving, because he spent too much money on replacement players, whereas Dubas spent money on stars, which is what teams should do).
The only way the Leafs blue-line can be even close to acceptable this season – barring an unlikely trade that actually helps the team and isn’t just about cutting costs – is if a rookie steps up.
Toronto Maple Leafs Will Need a Rookie Defenseman to Step Up
Jake McCabe is dirt-cheap and is a legitimate top-pairing defenseman. Morgan Rielly is also a top-pairing defenseman, but neither one of them is an elite star player – they are both solid “number-twos.”
Brodie is 33 and appears to have started (a rather late, but not unexpected) decline in play. He wasn’t very good in the playoffs and is the ideal trade candidate to get the Toronto Maple Leafs under the salary cap.
The team lost Justin Holl and didn’t replace him. Holl has been a very effective, if underrated, fourth-best defenseman on a contending team for years now. He wasn’t popular, and he was healthy-scratched for a game in the playoffs (deservedly) but he is quite a bit better than John Klingberg, and since at least he has a recent history of winning his minutes.
Klingberg is not going to be a top-four defender, and most likely will find himself stapled to the bench during important situations and playing on the 3rd unit during 5v5 play. What the Leafs were thinking when they gave him $4 million remains the summer’s biggest mystery.
Right now, Timothy Liljegren should be a shoe-in for the top four and a candidate to team’s best defenseman. His numbers over the last several years are great and he’s still only 24. Just one problem: the coach doesn’t seem to care for him, having scratched him (undeservedly) in both of the last playoff seasons.
Mark Giordano is a liability and shouldn’t be playing every game.
Connor Timmins did well last year in a limited sample, but who knows what he actually brings, and little can be expected of him.
The Leafs blue-line is missing a #1 defenseman, it’s missing any kind of physical presence (other than McCabe, but he’s not exactly Radko Gudas in terms of meanness) and worst of all, it’s missing upside.
At this point, the likelihood of a Timmins or Liljegren star turn is basically zero, and the team has a very bad cap situation (the money spent on Klingberg plus the easily movable Brodie could have given them $9 million to play with).
That means the Toronto Maple Leafs will need a rookie to win a job in camp and turn into an instant NHL star if they want to be a top team again this year.
Topi Niemela, Miko Kokkonen, and William Villeneuve are the three candidates for this to happen, and we’ll check in with full write-ups on each of them over the next few days, however the career trajectory for all three of them is unlikely to include being a star player.
The Leafs blue-line is a disaster. They need a rookie to save them and it doesn’t appear likely there is one who can do it.