Say Goodbye to a lot of Players Leaving the Leafs

For years now the Leafs have had a group of players who remained year-in, year-out. Once Auston Matthews was added in 2016 and then John Tavares in 2018, the fivesome that make up the core (sorry, but it is the only correct term) of the team have remained. And many, many people have wanted that changed virtually from the very first day.

We all walked into this offseason surrounded by a cacophony of demands for change. Not actually as loud as last season, mostly because, I believe, people in the media genuinely believed the Leafs were going to trade someone. They just seemed to think the team had to. And yet, no move can be just made easily because of no-move clauses in contracts.

After a month of, “They need to,” but, “They can’t,” but “They will find a way,” but, “There is no way,” and “Maybe they won’t,” we now have, “They have to wait until next year.” Which means it’s back to trying to fit in the best possible support players the cap space allows. Something the Leafs have tried very hard to do since the beginning. And that means players leave before they get paid more. I don’t know about everyone else, but I don’t have a lot of regrets about those cap casualties, save for the big one – Zach Hyman.

The UFAs this year are all mostly leaving.

Trading for Matt Murray was a clever scheme on Kyle Dubas’s part. And for one brief moment when he was fully healthy, he was pretty good. The Leafs did that very Leafy thing (the true meaning of that word) and helped him recover form his injury with all their resources even though he was never playing for them again. What his future will be is unclear because the only thing more difficult to understand than a goalie who has played is one who hasn’t.

I’m not sure he’s going to make a comeback, though.

A mistake of a signing with fully foreseeable on-ice results, John Klingberg actually got worse than his former status as one of the worst defenders in the NHL. I take a hard line with evaluating this player. I don’t think he’s been a top-pairing player save for a few years at his peak performance age. His points obscured his overall negative value as he declined long before he hit Anaheim. Brad Treliving got lucky that his clever scheme, like Dubas’s before him, was injured enough to go on LTIR.

I have no idea if he ever plays again.

Speaking of decline – it was a theme of this season for the Leafs. It was tough to watch TJ Brodie fail at defence after three years where he was Toronto’s defence. He was unplayable by the playoffs. At 34, a change in usage is coming for him, but it won’t be on the Leafs.

Mark Giordano

Which is sadder, Brodie, suffering the loss of his father last summer and not finding his game on the ice or Giordano, losing his father in-season and struggling to hold onto a third-pairing job. Giordano is actually, at 40, still playable. He had a significantly better season than the two guys above him on this list. I don’t want his career to end this way, and he says it hasn’t, but it’s painful that he couldn’t have gotten more chants of “Gio” at the end of this season.