Bad Drafting Haunts the Toronto Maple Leafs to This Day
By James Tanner
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.
Possible Winner of Worst Leafs Trade Rumour of the Summer. dark. Next
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.