Bad Drafting Haunts the Toronto Maple Leafs to This Day

The Toronto Maple Leafs have a surprising amount of talent in their farm system for a team that currently has the longest streak of making the playoffs in the NHL.

The Toronto Maple Leafs haven ‘t made a high draft pick since 2016, and spent the majority of the years before 2018 making bad picks.

To wit: the 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 drafts, were the Leafs got Marner, Matthews and Liljegren, were completely wasted, outside the top picks.

Had the Leafs drafted better when they were getting and developing their core players, they likely already would have won a Championship.

Bad Drafting Haunts the Toronto Maple Leafs to This Day

Brendan Shanhanan, Lou Lamoriello, Mark Hunter and Kyle Dubas all deserve blame for the horrible drafting that continues to haunt the Toronto Maple Leafs.

To be fair, the Leafs might already have won a Stanley Cup with just a little bit of luck, but that’s a talk for another time.

Right now, let’s explore the four drafts where the Toronto Maple Leafs set the course of their team for the next decade.  The drafts where they got all their two best players (and 2017) which, despite yielding some of the best players in franchise history, continue to haunt the team to this day.

What haunts the Leafs is the knowledge that had they hit on just one or two better players during these years, everything would have been different.

Think about it: they were a top contender despite bad drafting, a frozen cap and bad timing signing their core, in addition to trying to compete for years without any cap space. (stats for this article, and draft information hockeydb.com and cap info from capfriendly.com).

Had they found their Brayden Point, Kris Letang, or Duncan Keith – i.e a low drafted superstar to augment their top picks, they would have been unstoppable.  Had they found just a couple above average players, they’d likely have done significantly better.

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.

The 2017 Draft

The Toronto Maple Leafs didn’t do much better in 2017.

Despite how badly the previous two drafts have gone after the top picks, 2017 is arguably worse because it didn’t include a top-of-the-lineup superstar.

The Leafs took Liljegren with their first pick, and it was a decent enough selection.  It’s six years later, and the team still has Liljegren and he still has untapped potential.

That’s better than most late 20s picks.

But after that? Nothing.

The Leafs took Eemeli Rasanen 59th overall, then they took Ian Scott, Vladislav Kara, Fedor Gordeev, Ryan McGregor and Ryan O’Connell.

Combined, they have played zero NHL games.

Not a single one of them is currently under contract to the team.

Over three drafts, the Leafs had 27 picks, which is six more than normal.  They used three of those picks to take Marner, Matthews and Liljegren.

The best they did with the other 24 picks was Travis Dermott, Pierre Engvall, and Joseph Woll.

That is as bad, if not worse, than their drafting in the late-80s and early 90s.  If the team had of hit on just one above average NHL player with any of those picks, things could have been so much different.

It is truly a brutal record of drafting.  It’s great that they got basically two hall of famers at the top of the draft, but the fact that the scouting department of the richest team in the National Hockey League literally drafted worse than a monkey would have is just flabbergasting.  There isn’t anything I can say that can exaggerate or hyperbolize this that would put the proper emphasis on how badly the Leafs did here.

If you put this period of drafting into it’s proper context, which is to account for the resources available to the Toronto Maple Leafs, the amount of money the people responsible for the picks were making, the actual odds of getting so little out of the draft, and, most of all, the importance of the picks in terms of creating a championship window around the two Hall of Famers you just drafted,  It might be the worst period of drafting in NHL history.