When the season starts, will the Toronto Maple Leafs dress their best lineup?

The Toronto Maple Leafs have already made some extremely weird and questionable decisions in the pres-season so far.

We've got to take a lot of this with a grain of salt because while we watched the Toronto Maple Leafs play 89 games last year, their new coach only knows what he saw the two times that the Leafs played the Blues (St. Louis won both).

That said, after a great season on the Marlies and an impressive performance in the Rookie Showcase, there is no excuse (unless he's injured and no one told me) for Topi Niemela to have been left out of all four pre-season games so far,

The rest of the weird stuff makes me wonder if the Leafs will even dress their best lineup when the season starts.

When the season starts, will the Toronto Maple Leafs dress their best lineup?

Why did the Leafs invite a 35 year old Max Pacioretty to camp? All his presense does is make it harder for more deserving, higher upside players to get a chance. It is literally an impossibility for the 35 year old Pacioretty to get back to a star level, and he doesn't come with much upside at this point.

Why do the Leafs still have Ryan Reaves, David Kampf and Calle Jarkrok on their roster? With Steve Lorentz, Connor Dewar, Alex Steeves, Pontus Holmberg, Nikita Grebenkin and Bobby McMann the Leafs do not lack for bottom-of-the-lineup options.

While Reaves is useless, Kampf and Jarnkrok do bring versitility and defensive acumen to the roster (and Jarnkrok can score a bit, at least in the regular season) but the three players combine to make over $6 million which could easily be used to upgrade the roster with one star player later in the season.

Do the Leafs realize that Timothy Liljegren is their third best defenseman? It's not clear that they do.

Do the Leafs realize that Max Domi is a solid winger who should play with Auston Matthews? Do they realize that he is a horrendous centre, and that him and Nylander are too poor defensively to pair together?

Do they understand that Marner, Matthews and Nylander should all be on different lines in order to almost always have one of the league's best players on the ice at all times? Do they realize that Easton Cowan should play 82 games in the NHL this year?

The Leafs best lineup and the lineup they likely dress when the season opens appear to be miles apart.

At this point it would be shocking if they opened the season with their best lineup.