The Toronto Maple Leafs multiple playoff failures have brought a lot of talk about changing the core of the team. This got us thinking. How might the Leafs look different had they selected other players during the draft years of their core players?
The drafting that the Toronto Maple Leafs did after the first round in the years where they also drafted Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, and Morgan Rielly was objectively bad. Had they done better, they likely would have won a Stanley Cup by now.
For this exercise, first let's outline some parameters. Hindsight being 20/20, of course, every team in the NHL would love to correct mistakes they made at the draft table. All teams can look back with regret about players they didn't take.
Second, this is for entertainment purposes only. Assuming a team's evaluation of teenagers will not come without oversights is completely unrealistic.
Lastly, this retrospective of the Leafs recent drafts will only look at players that they took versus players that were still available and could have been selected at that draft position. In other words, picks that the team traded away and used by another club were not evaluated.
Also, the Leafs team needs at each particular draft slot were not taken into account. In our retrospective, they simply took the best player available.
The 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2016 NHL drafts will be recalibrated. These are the drafts where the Leafs selected their core players. John Tavares was added as a free agent so he is not considered here.
Morgan Rielly, William Nylander, Mitch Marner, and Auston Matthews were the players the Leafs selected with their first-round picks during each of these drafts.
We will review if the Leafs choosing them was the proper choice in hindsight. For each of those respective drafts, we will also look at other selections the Leafs made and what notable players were available. Did the Leafs make the right choice? If not, who should they have taken?
Without further ado, let's begin our look back and analysis of these drafts, starting with the 2012 NHL Draft. (Note: all draft statistics courtesy of hockeydb.com.)