Evaluating the Scott Laughton Trade: Grade Depends On Other Maple Leafs Moves

The Toronto Maple Leafs picked up a decent player at a - comparatively - decent price on Friday afternoon ahead of the NHL's 2025 Trade Deadline.

In Laughton, the Toronto Maple Leafs get a LW/C who adds depth and basically no scoring to an already deep forward group. To be sure, he is a slight upgrade over playing Max Domi at centre, but he is far from being an impact player.

Laughton adds the kind of intangibles that coaches love and that people always seem to think will help teams win in the playoffs. He can hit, fight, lead, grind, sacrifice himself, play injured, block shots, fight a dude etc. Scoring and goalies are the main things that help teams win, but it never hurts to have a guy like Scott Laughton in your lineup, even if the NHL and it's analysts and fans have a longstanding habit of overrating these kinds of players.

So on a day that saw the league pay ridiculous prices for bit players, the Leafs made a reasonable move here, trading a 2027 top-ten protected first and Nikita Grebonkin who was drafted in the 5th round and who ultimately returned excellent value to the Leafs for such a low pick.

Evaluating the Scott Laughton Trade: Grade Depends On Other Maple Leafs Moves

I like Grebonkin as a player but drafting him in the 5th and trading him like he's worth a 2nd is just good business no matter how he turns out. The Leafs also get a 4th and a 6th back which offsets the cost quite a bit.

Considering the Leafs kept their best picks and prospects and they upgraded at a spot in the lineup that they were thin at (centre, even if Laughton prefers to be/ or is better as a winger) it's hard to be too mad about this trade.

Laughton vs Ryan O'Reilly or Brayden Schenn is preferable given the cost and salary factors. He is also here for next season as well and on a very cheap $1.5 million cap-hit. I would prefer the flexibility of a UFA but Laughton for Dewar money is a steal.

The positives of this trade are that it fulfils a positional need, it makes the Leafs deeper and certainly a third line built around Laughton is better than one built around Max Domi. It also will allow the Leafs to stop feeding the good zone starts to Domi and give them to Matthews and Marner who don't get nearly as many offensive zone faceoffs as they should or as many as stars on other teams get. The cost is also reasonable.

The negatives are really more about opportunity cost than anything else: could the Leafs just called up Fraser Minten and kept the assets to use on a high impact defenseman? We'll never know, but I don't think we can even evaluate this trade until we see what else the Leafs do today. Another negative is that Laughton just isn't that good. He's OK. He's not great.

If the Leafs go out and get a higher impact player than Scott Laughton then I think this is a good trade and give it a B+.

But if this is the best the Leafs do when other teams are adding Rantanan, JT Miller and Seth Jones, I give it an F.