Breaking down the Toronto Maple Leafs 2024-25 Blue-Line

The Toronto Maple Leafs blue-line in last year's playoffs was a very big mess and a massive weakness for the team.

In the history of the NHL Trade Deadline, you'd be hard-pressed to find a manager that mis-read his team's strengths and weaknesses as badly as Toronto Maple Leafs GM Brad Treliving did at last year's Trade Deadline.

First, any person who has risen up to run a big, multi-million dollar organization should be smart enough to understand the most basic principle of managing anything is that the fastest and best path to improvement is to lean into what you're already good at. I realize the NHL is the rare place where uneducated people can rise up to run organizations because of their playing careers and a general nepotism that has permeated the league for years, but for a manager to not know this basic thing is, frankly, pathetic and embarassing.

The Leafs led the NHL in 5v5 scoring last season. A reasonable path to improve them would be to add players that will make them better at what they are good at. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't address weaknesses, it just means that doing a .180 and attempting to change your game completely is a terrible idea.

The Leafs didn't add any offense at the deadline. They added three defensive players, including Connor Dewar, a 4th line replacement player who could have been replaced by any Marlie without anyone noticing or any results changing. The other two were both slow defenseman who can't shoot, pass or move the puck at an NHL level.

The Leafs dressed a blue-line that featured Morgan Rielly and sometimes Timothy Liljegren, and then some variation of Edmundson, McCabe, Lyubushkin, Brodie and Benoit. Of their seven defenseman, one is a great puck mover, one is average, and five are way, way below average. Predictably this hurt their ability to score goals. The Leafs failed to score more than three goals for the entirity of their series against the Bruins. They also only scored three goals once, and two or less six times.

Their poorly constructed blue-line only exasperated their already existent problem with scoring goals when their four superstars weren't the ones scoring.

Treliving seemed to realize his error and he let Lyubushkin and Edmundson walk this summer. But did he do enough to improve the Leafs blue-line? Four of the same players are back (Rielly, McCabe, Benoit, Liljegren) and they will be joined by two geezers on the downside of their careers, but who can at least move the puck. Of course Treliving couldn't just go the entire summer without doing something mindbreakingly stupid, so he also signed Jani Hakanpaa for reasons inexplicable.

Hopefully the Leafs get a mulligan on that one, but either way, barring the entrance of Topi Niemela, the Leafs blue-line will once again be below average at moving the puck, something a team with Nylander, Matthews, Marner, Tavares and Domi should not have to deal with.

With all that said, let's break down the Leafs blue-line for the upcoming season. (cap info from puckpedia.com and stats from naturalstattrick.com).