Brad Treliving's Best and Worst Moves As the Toronto Maple Leafs GM
Brad Treliving's Worst Decisions With The Maple Leafs
Last offseason, Brad Treliving signed John Klingberg to a one-year, $4.150 million contract.
I don't want to discuss Klingberg's performance in this situation because an injury kept the sample size too small to worry about critiquing.
However, Treliving was crazy to think this guy would make a significant impact. Sure, he is a quality puck mover and was terrific on the powerplay in the past. Still, the guy is a straight-up liability in the defensive zone, which made his puck-moving skills useless because he needed tons of help to get the puck back from opponents.
Even if Klingberg stayed healthy, spending that much money on a guy who would play the third pairing and quarterback the second powerplay unit would always be a waste of money.
The next awful move was Treliving trading for Joel Edmundson and Ilya Lybushkin at the trade deadline.
These two trades still boggle my mind to this day. Treliving gave up a third-round pick to get each of these guys the same price the Florida Panthers paid to bring in Vladimir Tarasenko.
Throughout the entire first half of the season, it was evident the Maple Leafs needed more puck movers on the back end, as they finished the regular season with the fourth most defensive zone turnovers in the NHL (via MoneyPuck). Treliving tried to solve this issue by bringing in two of the worst puck movers in the NHL, which only worsened the problem.
The final decision that must be mentioned is Treliving's decision to sit on his hands at the trade deadline and stick with Ilya Samsonov in the net.
While Samsonov somewhat turned his game around in the second half of the season, his game could have been better with Jeremy Swayman, Linus Ullmark, Andrei Vasilevsky, Igor Shesterkin and Sergei Bobrovsky.
The Toronto Maple Leafs would have been better off with almost every starting goalie who made the Eastern Conference playoffs. Still, Treliving decided to go with a guy that he put on waivers, giving every team in the league a chance to get him for nothing. Not one was interested.
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That clearly showed that no one competing for a playoff spot believed Samsonov could improve their team. Treliving was the only one dumb enough to believe it, and ultimately, the Maple Leaf's first-round loss came down to the Bruins getting elite goaltending for the entire series and the Maple Leafs getting lackluster goaltending from Samsonov for the first five games of the series.