The 4 Next Moves the Toronto Maple Leafs Should Make This Offseason
What potential immediate offseason moves by the Leafs can help lead them to long term success?
Following their first round exit of the Stanley Cup Playoffs at the hands of the Boston Bruins, the Toronto Maple Leafs began to embark on their quest to make undeniable significant changes for the upcoming season to hopefully finally get the team over the hump.
The action started when head coach Sheldon Keefe was fired by the Toronto Maple Leafs shortly after the end of their season.
Within due time, the Leafs quickly found their successor in hiring former Stanley Cup champion-winning coach Craig Berube to take the reigns of the team.
With a new head honcho at the helm, more changes will be expected at the coaching staff level to ultimately assemble a competent group to help lead the Maple Leafs back to the promised land.
But what other immediate moves should the Leafs start to make in the coming weeks to ensure that the team will have the best possible success going forward?
4 Next Moves the Toronto Maple Leafs Should Make This Offseason
Here, we take a look at four key moves that the Maple Leafs should focus on making in their not-so-distant future.
Obviously, there will probably be more than just these four, but these will be important enough such that they will have a significant impact for the outcome of the team in the years to come.
Assign a New Coach for the Power Play
After seeing the absolute domination by teams like the Edmonton Oilers, Tampa Bay Lightning and Colorado Avalanche on the power play in recent years with their loaded superstars, it is sometimes quite incomprehensible why the Leafs don’t have the same level of dominating play with the man advantage with their own collection of stars.
After all, their “core four” should be quite comparable to the units thrown out by the aforementioned teams above.
In reality, the Leafs actually aren’t as bad as they seem, as they have ranked within the top 10 in the league the past few years in terms of power play success rate.
But for whatever reason, their power play numbers always seem to go on a decline as the season progresses, and eventually bottoms out come playoff time.
This year was no different, as they were only able to muster just one measly goal in 21 chances in the series against the Bruins.
Have the Leafs power play setup gone stale, or have teams been able to somehow figure out their strategies during the course of the season and end up shutting them down when the games mattered most.
Whichever the case it may be, what the Leafs power play coach has implemented as their game plan clearly hasn’t been working.
For this past season, the onus was on Guy Boucher when he was assigned to the role of managing the Leafs power play. Unfortunately, it ended up failing at the worst possible time. As a result, the team needs to find a new coach to run their power play for the upcoming year for Toronto to have any chance of success beyond the regular season.
Extend Jake McCabe ASAP
With Morgan Rielly often stealing the spotlight on the Leafs defense for reasons of both good and bad, one defensive stalwart that has flown under the radar and has practically gone unnoticed this past season was the play of Jake McCabe.
After coming over from the Chicago Blackhawks at the 2023 trade deadline, McCabe has actually been one of the most reliable defenseman for the team in terms of both offense and defense.
Offensively, McCabe put together a career year with the Leafs this past season when he scored 8 goals and added another 20 assists for 28 points in 73 games played.
He also looked good in the sporadic times he was put on the power play and possessed a strong, accurate shot that opposing goaltenders should respect.
Defensively, McCabe has done well in practically everything that was expected of him and more. He ranked second on the team in hits with 219 and third in blocked shots with 129, becoming the defensive general in the backend for the Leafs.
More importantly, at 5-on-5 situations, McCabe had a 51% CF, and 52% expected goals and scoring chances rate, tilting the ice in the Leafs favor despite often facing the opposing teams’ top lines.
Currently, McCabe has one year left in his contract valued at just $2 million (since the other $2 million of his salary was retained by the Blackhawks).
With his potential and smart game play improving by the day, it should be a priority for the Leafs to lock him down before he prices himself out of town. With his gritty style of play, couple with his flashes of elite offensive potential, he is the closest Jake Muzzin-facsimile that the Leafs have and that in itself speaks about how valuable he can be for the team and their future.
Re-Sign Max Domi
Last offseason, both Tyler Bertuzzi and Max Domi became two of the Leafs key signings to help augment their offense for the 2023-24 season.
Given what they had accomplished in the past, they were highly expected to break out with the star-studded lineup that the Maple Leafs provided.
Unfortunately, both players struggled to find their game quite extensively during the first half of the season. However, both of them were able to drastically turn things around in the latter half of the season, especially when they were eventually put on a line with superstar Auston Matthews.
Bertuzzi was the goal scorer with 21 goals, whereas Domi was mainly the skilled playmaker recording 38 assists, which was his highest total since his breakout 2018-19 season with the Montreal Canadiens.
In addition, Domi added a welcoming level of feistiness like his dad Tie, totalling a whopping 118 penalty minutes last year while standing up for the team on multiple occasions. (All stats from hockey-reference.com and naturalstattrick.com)
With both players entering free agency once again this offseason, it is essential that the Leafs bring back at least one of them, and that one player has to be Domi.
With numerous rumors swirling of the possible trade of star winger Mitch Marner this summer, the Leafs need the best possible playmaker to make up for the potential loss of Marner.
Domi may not be exactly be “magic” like Marner’s abilities and passes, but he definitely can come close to it when he was on his game as many have witnessed this season. Added to the fact that he is now more comfortable with the environment and players that he has played with, he will only get better as the team chemistry grows even more.
As a result, Domi should be given the chance to establish a legacy with the Leafs, just like his dad did in his time.
Trade For a Legitimate Goaltender
Finally, it is about time that the Leafs seriously consider trading for a legitimate goaltender.
With Ilya Samsonov considered as being one of the top goaltenders available in the market this coming July and with the Leafs already expected to move on from him, it has become obvious that there will be no better options available in the upcoming free agency.
On top of that, with recent rumors suggesting possible solutions in signing the likes of Laurent Brossoit or Anthony Stolarz to tandem with Joseph Woll, forget about improving, as entertaining those ideas could make the Leafs even worse off than they were in 2023-24.
In addition, despite Woll showing at times this past season that he has the potential qualities to evolve into a solid No. 1 goaltender in the NHL, at this moment he is still quite raw as he has actually appeared in a total of just 36 regular season games in his career.
Added to the fact that he had shown to be a bit injury-prone last year when he was out for almost three months between December to February, along with getting injured again after two games in the playoffs, he may not be ready quite yet to take on a full starter’s workload.
Moreover, looking back on the Leafs playoff success in the past, they had the likes of Ed Belfour and Curtis Joseph leading the way in net to help the team make deeper playoff runs.
So to make the current version of the Leafs perennial deep threats in the postseason, they should do whatever they can to secure the services of an established No. 1 goalie. Especially if they really do end up dealing Marner, they will definitely have the resources and cap room to make it possible.
Obviously candidates such as Connor Hellebuyck and Igor Shesterskin are out of the question, but more plausible ones in Juuse Saros or Jacob Markstrom could be workable ideal choices.
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Nevertheless, the Leafs shouldn’t waste the prime of their stars any longer, so making the right move to bring in a top netminder to backstop them to victory should be the team’s number one goal this offseason.