Toronto Maple Leafs Regular Season+ Playoff Grades
Grading Brad Treliving's First Year As Toronto Maple Leafs General Manager
The only acceptable way to start this grading process is starting with the man responsible for building this roster, let's start with the first year Maple Leafs General Manager.
Brad Treliving Grade: F-
Treliving walked into any general manager's dream job with the Toronto Maple Leafs last summer. Mostly, the Leafs had a playoff-contending roster with an established group of superstars and tons of cap space to work with this past offseason.
There may have been somethings that were less than ideal, but overall few, if any, GMs have ever walked into a better situation.
To start with, Treliving made a couple of big signings in Tyler Bertuzzi and Max Domi; I will admit that Treliving did a good job not offering either of these two guys more than a one-year deal, which will give the Maple Leafs a lot of cap freedom heading into this upcoming season. Despite signing these guys to good deals, neither performed up to expectation, but we will get into that later.
Moving on to Treliving's subsequent offseason signing, John Klingberg, it may be unfair to judge this signing as Klingberg only played 14 games before landing on the long-term injured reserve for the rest of the season.
Those 14 games were terrible and it was embarrassing for the Leafs that they clearly signed a player who was damaged goods.
The other offseason signing Trevling made was Ryan Reaves. Giving a 37 year old enforcer with a history of being scratched in the playoffs a three-year deal for more than the league minimum was almost as embarrassing as signing a broken defenseman.
During the season, Treliving performed the worst, though. It was clear the Maple Leafs needed a goaltender and defensive help. Treliving addressed these issues by standing by Ilya Samsonov, whom Treliving himself put on waivers earlier in the season and brought in Ilya Lybushkin, Joel Edmundson and Connor Dewar.
Going into the playoffs with a goalie who was on waivers in January and the worst puck-moving and least mobile blue-line of any team in the league was an absolute joke.
Long story short, Treliving did not do a good job of giving this team the best chance to win, honestly during the season he probably did more harm than good, we'll talk more about this throughout this piece, but for reasons I just detailed, Treliving failed as in his first chance as the Maple Leafs General Manager.