The Toronto Maple Leafs Should Give Minutes to Prospects, Not PTOs

The Toronto Maple Leafs summer is at that low point where nothing has happened for a while and people are starting to get bored, which means we've reached PTO Listicle season.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are unlikely to be done making moves because they still haven't improved their roster since the season ended. But that doesn't mean they should be inviting a bunch of washed up former stars or post-hype prospects to training camp.

The Leafs made a plethora of moves, but in reality, all non-star players are interchangable and don't really affect the outcome of games. (Which is why PTOs are generally a waste of time).

So all that really happened this summer that matter is that Tyler Bertuzzi is gone and Chris Tanev is here, which isn't good enough, which means more moves are coming.

The Toronto Maple Leafs Should Give Minutes to Prospects, Not PTOs

Now, the Leafs are definitely smart in this case, given the rest of their roster, to spend that $5 million on a defenseman instead of a forward, but no matter what, the gains from adding Tanev are almost entirely cancelled out by losing Tyler Bertuzzi.

Therefore they are likely to make another move to improve their team more. But that move will be for an impact player, hopefully Patrik Laine.

What the Leafs don't need is to sign a PTO.

PTO are player try-outs and it means that a player who is unsigned can walk on and try to win a job at training camp.

Last year the Leafs gave out some PTOs and Noah Gregor ended up making the team.

The year before the same thing happened with Zach Aston-Reese.

Neither player had any kind of impact on the Leafs, other than blocking the team from giving minutes to a younger prospect with more upside.

This is a very dumb thing to do.

PTO players are unlikely to have much, if any, upside. What you see is almost certainly what you get. But when you use a prospect instead, you aren't using a player who is much worse, but your team gets the benifit of upside. That player might turn out to be better than you thought and might challange for minutes higher in the lineup.

One thing the Leafs have been very bad at is breaking in their young players to the lineup. This is because they always load up their bottom six with name-brand players like Sam Lafferty and PTOs like Noah Gregor, and have no room to give minutes to the likes of Alex Steeves or Roni Hiroven.

This year the Leafs need to be smarter. They need to stop handing out contracts to near-30 vets with limited potential and instead use those minutes to help develop young players.