Bad Drafting Haunts the Toronto Maple Leafs to This Day
By James Tanner
2015 Toronto Maple Leafs Draft
It all starts here.
Brendan Shanahan has just taken over. He waited a while, but he fired Dave Nonis and brought in Lou Lamoriello.
In between though, Kyle Dubas was the GM.
This is when the Leafs acquired Zach Hyman in Dubas’ first ever trade. Then after that, he sent Phil Kessel to the Pittsburgh Penguins which allowed the Leafs to bottom-out and select Auston Matthews.
Dubas often doesn’t get the credit, but he was CO-GM when he drafted Marner, and his machinations are why the Leafs had the number-one pick. Given it was an automatic choice, Lou Lamoriello has less to do with it than Dubas, even though he was technically the GM when the pick was made.
Anyways, 2015:
The Toronto Maple Leafs had nine picks. That is exactly what a rebuilding team should do, but unfortunately, they did not make good use of them.
Marner was a good pick, obviously. Travis Dermott was the second pick, and it was an OK pick but he never lived up to his potential even if he made the NHL.
After that it’s Jeremy Bracco, Andrew Nielson, Martins Dzierkals, Jesper Lindgren, Dmytro Tymashov, Stephan Desrocher and Nikita Korostelev.
Essentially, the Leafs went 1 for 9. That is pathetic. Just drafting eight random players likely would have led to better results. It’s not hard to see how even getting just a slightly better player than Dermott would have been incredibly helpful, let alone hitting on a hall of famer or getting lucky and getting a few NHLers.
This draft, after Marner, yielded basically nothing.