The Toronto Maple Leafs blue-line stinks. It is objectively bad. It is the worst blue-line out of any team that can reasonably call itself a contender for this year's Stanley Cup.
The Toronto Maple Leafs blue-line features a bunch of very good complimentary pieces, but in a star driven league, the lack of a true superstar to captain the blue-line really hurts the Leafs chances.
Morgan Rielly remains great offensively and would be a very solid second banana on a top pairing. He is currently not capable of being the number-one the Leafs are asking him to be.
Chris Tanev and Jake McCabe can form one of the best defensive shut-down pairings in hockey. What they can't do is move the puck up the ice and create offense. What makes them so good, compared to other stay-at-home players, is that they can actually move the puck well enough to avoid getting hemmed in their zone (especially Tanev). The issue is that they just can't create enough offense to justify playing them with Auston Matthews or Mitch Marner.
The Leafs 3rd pairing gets routinely crushed and they desperately need to be able to use Oliver Ekman-Larson on that pairing to steady things. Unfortunately, until they add their superstar, they have to play OEL too high in the lineup.
The big idea being peddled by people who should know better, is to trade for Luke Schenn. That's right. Luke Schenn. The slow, ineffective, ancient defender who has already played in and left Toronto twice before.
The Single Worst, Laziest and Offensive Idea in Toronto Maple Leafs History
Luke Schenn is a bad fit: The Leafs need two puck-movers. One for the 3rd pairing and a superstar for their top pairing. They already have Phillippe Myers and Simon Benoit and Luke Schenn is no better than those guys.
Luke Schenn plays the opposite way from what the Leafs need. I find it offensive to even suggest the Leafs trade for him. It implies that we, the fans, are stupid - that will willing salivate for this formerly popular player even though he hasn't been good in years. I just feel that after 60 years without a Stanley Cup, everyone writing about this team should be encouraging them to go for it. What is the point of saying the best player the Leafs could add is a guy who is somewhere around the 200th best defenseman in the NHL?
This is a league where non-star players are largely interchangeable (especially when considering the salary cap ramifications of paying for slightly above average players whose per-dollar value is the lowest out of all players).
The Leafs brought in Schenn in two years ago, stupidly played him the top four and then were left wondering why they lost. Last year they couldn't get him, for whatever reason, so they went after Joel Edmundson and Ilya Lyubushkin, two Schenn Clones. Neither was effective and in fact, both sucked quite badly.
The Leafs even did that stupid thing where they put Lyubushkin with Rielly, and, guess what? It was a complete failure.
So why would the Leafs go down the exact same road for the third straight season? Why would anyone ever suggest such a thing? It's not fair to Leafs fans, who should at least be able to hope for a better player. If anything, reporters should be encouraging the Leafs to make a bolder, higher-risk play because their safe bargain hunting for "playoff type" guys has produced nothing but wasted draft picks and failure after failure after failure after failure.
There are better players available - Noah Dobson and Bowen Byram both have just slightly higher cap-hits than Schenn, and both are top pairing players who are a hundred times the player Schenn was at his peak, let alone now when he's one of the oldest players in hockey.
Just shouting out Luke Schenn seems so lazy to me. A third go-round for this guy? Really? Are there other names of NHL players that you know? Why Schenn? What is the fascination with this mid-range player whose career is actually pretty disappointing in relation to his draft position.
According to Schenn's player card on the Athletic (paywalled, sorry) he is a negative value player. The Predators would actually have been slightly better this season just by not having Luke Schenn in their lineup. They are losing 28-20 when he plays.
Worse, Schenn is 35 and signed for another year after this. He has a cap-hit of $2.75 million, but isn't worth the league minimum. Not only should the Leafs not trade for him, but if he was on waivers they would be correct to pass on him.
Saying the Leafs should trade for Luke Schenn is lazy to the point of being offensive. The Leafs need to aim higher, that is obvious to everyone. If, for some reason, the brains of the Leafs management team all melt, and they do in fact trade for Luke Schenn, then fire them all.
This of the absolute dumbest thing you can imagine the Leafs doing. Now triple it and you're in the ballpark of how dumb trading for Luke Schenn, again, would be.