7 Reasons Why the Toronto Maple Leafs Are In Big Trouble
By James Tanner
4. Roster Building
The Toronto Maple Leafs roster doesn’t really make sense.
Max Domi is is not good enough to play on the first line. Nylander and Tavares are too poor defensively to play Domi with him.
That leaves the third line, but you can’t build any kind of shut-down line with Max Domi on it, which means you can’t play David Kampf on the third line.
Kampf shouldn’t be on a third line, because he doesn’t score, but at least you could build a defensive shut-down line with him on it and make due. Max Domi prevents that.
So with Domi and Kampf on the same team, you have a situation where one of them needs to be an extremely expensive fourth line piece.
It makes roster building impossible, especially if you have Ryan Reaves on the fourth line, ruining any good that Kampf does.
It’s not so much the individual players as their mix.
Having spent over $5 million dollars on two bottom six players who are one-dimensional in opposite ways means it’s extremely hard for Sheldon keefe to build a workable lineup.
It’s hard to look at the Leafs roster and then think it was a good idea to change GMs five minutes before the off-season started. Treliving had to get caught up on the fly, and it shows.
I hope he’s a better general manager than he’s showed so far, because I’d fire him right now without a second thought. To date, he’s about as good a GM as John Ferguson Jr, which I think might be honestly be unfair to old JFJ.