The Toronto Maple Leafs will start the season with a pretty obvious pecking order on the goalie depth chart.
There is little doubt, barring injury, that Ilya Samsonov will be the Toronto Maple Leafs opening night goalie and regular starter.
Following that, since he is coming off of a very good season and has no waiver eligibility left, Joseph Woll will for-sure be the Leafs back-up goalie.
Martin Jones will be third on the depth chart, assuming he doesn’t get taken on waivers as soon as the Leafs try to send him to the AHL. (Which he likely won’t, because he is terrible).
While the Leafs will for-sure start the season this way, there is a good chance that things don’t end up working as expected.
Joseph Woll Can Win the Toronto Maple Leafs Starting Job
The Toronto Maple Leafs have shown that they aren’t very interested in locking up goalies to big contracts for the long term. This has been obvious now for a while, as they refused to pay Freddie Anderson, Jack Campbell, or Ilya Samsonov when their deals came up.
Goalies are unpredictable and outside four or five in the league, it’s not worth the money and risk to sign them long-term to big contracts.
The Leafs went to arbitration with Samsonov and he’s an unrestricted free-agent next summer.
Since the Leafs don’t have a long-term commitment to Samsonov, it creates a situation where they aren’t going to be as gung-ho to get starts for their perceived starter as a normal team.
For example, if you have a $8 million dollar goalie, he gets a lot of second and third chances. If you want to see how this can impact a team’s playoff chances, check out Calgary’s season last year.
Not only is Woll in a good position to get a chance to steal starts, he’s coming off of a season that basically vaulted him to the top of the Toronto Maple Leafs Top Prospects List.
In the AHL last year, Woll won 16 of 21 games while posting a .927 save percentage, and a 2.37 GAA which is incredible.
In the NHL, he won 6 of 7 games, and had a .932 save percentage and a 2.16 GAA. (nhl.com).
Only five goalies played more than six games and had an equal or better 5v5 save percentage than Woll. The sample size makes this meaningless, I’m just trying to show that when he did play in the NHL last year, he put up elite numbers.
In all situations, Woll had the second highest save percentage in the NHL, after Linus Ulmark, with a minimum of 150 minutes played. Again, this isn’t really meaningful because of the sample size, but it shows that Woll does at least have the ability to be an elite player.
Woll makes under $800 K, so if circumstances end up making him the Toronto Maple Leafs starting goalie, and he performs well, he would have one of the best contracts in the NHL, which would in turn really help the cap-strapped Leafs.
One major problem the Leafs face is that Bunting was turning in a star performance for 900K and that’s incredibly hard to replace. Woll, along with Nick Robertson and Matthew Knies give the Leafs the best chance to give the team a major boost by performing at a high level on a league-minimum contract.
I think he’ll find himself as the starter at some point next season and into the playoffs.