Of the 32 NHL Teams, The Toronto Maple Leafs Had the Worst Offseason

The Toronto Maple Leafs had the one of the worst summers in the history of their franchise.

In addition to that, there isn’t any team who came close to having as bad of an offseason as the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The Leafs offseason was so bad that if this season doesn’t go well, Brendan Shanahan is probably done.

Hopefully that will result in the promotion of Brandon Pridham into Team President/GM, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Of the 32 NHL Teams, The Toronto Maple Leafs Had the Worst Offseason

The Bruins had a bad offseason, the Penguins and Blackhawks had a great one.  The Blue Jackets hired mike Babcock, and the Leafs still did worse than that.

The Leafs summer got off to a horrible start with the unnecessary and misguided firing of Kyle Dubas.

Things got dumber when the team appeared to do almost no searching, and settled on the first GM available.

That GM, Brad Treliving, was a strange choice – he didn’t seem to be a particularly good GM in Calgary, and there was nothing to set him apart from dozens of generic hockey executives.

Treliving got off to the worst start possible by signing the unnecessary, and ancient Ryan Reaves to a contract.  A league minimum deal for a single year would have been stupid, but Treliving doubled the league minimum and signed the 36 year old enforcer to a three-year deal like it was 1996.

A useless player, whose main skill is no longer necessary, for double the necessary cap-hit, and triple the necessary length.  Good times!

For perspective, John Ferguson Jr. probably even thought this was a bad move (we assume, since pretty much everyone thinks this was a horrible move).

Shortly after that, Treliving spent an additional $9.5 million of his precious salary cap on replacement players. In addition to Reaves, he added Kampf, Domi and Klingberg, even though this put the Toronto Maple Leafs way over the salary cap.

That is over $11 million dollars in replacement players.

Incompetency is a word that comes to mind here.

Kampf is a one-dimensional defense-only centre who was not even worth playing after Pierre Engvall was moved.

Domi is a one-dimensional offensive player who is way more famous than his play warrants. Here is a fun chart which rates Domi a 7 out of 100 for the last three seasons.

John Klingberg was the worst player on one of the worst teams last year.  His offense is something the Leafs don’t need, and he provides no defense, and even less physicality.  Regular readers know how I feel about Luke Schenn, but the Leafs would be better off giving Schenn $4 million than Klingberg.

Signing Klingberg was almost worse than signing Reaves.  The Leafs wasted $4 million on him, they are still not cap compliant and they now have one of the weakest blue-lines in the NHL.

Additionally, the Leafs took Ilya Samsonov to arbitration, which was probably a mistake.  What they did at the draft was uninspiring.

In addition to all these bad moves, the Leafs lost Michael Bunting (they can’t replace his star performance on a 900K deal), Ryan O’Reilly, Noel Acciari, Alex Kerfoot, Zach Aston-Reese, Justin Holl and Luke Schenn.

That is a lot of talent and toughness walking away.

The Leafs talk about getting players who play the right way, but it seems to me all of the players they lost actually do that, while, for example, Max Domi gets credit for playing like his father (he doesn’t).

The Toronto Maple Leafs are worse now than they were when the season ended and worse than they were last October.   Their blue-line is horrible, their bottom-six is among the worst in the league, and they are not only over the salary cap, they seem to have blocked players like Nick Robertson and Topi Niemela from having a chance to make the team.

They get full credit for signing Tyler Bertuzzi, but when your best move is putting a goalie on the LTIR, you know it’s been a brutal offseason.  “Brutal” doesn’t even cut it, however.

Oh, and you can’t forget that Auston Matthews and William Nylander are still not signed.

The Toronto Maple Leafs had the worst offseason of any team in the NHL.