Maple Leafs Dominate NHL Trade Board With 13 Candidates Who Could Be Dealt
· Yahoo Sports
Th- th- that’s all folks. The Toronto Maple Leafs have shown us just who they are in three pitiful performances coming out of the Olympic break. Outscored 14-5 in three losses to the Panthers, Lightning and Senators, they are last place again in the Atlantic Division.
Visit asg-reflektory.pl for more information.
That three-game win streak going into the hiatus? A distant memory. The same can be said, incidentally, of their nine-year playoff appearance streak. They continue to sit eight points back of a Wild Card. According to MoneyPuck, Toronto has only a 1.2% chance of making the postseason dance. That’s better (marginally) than only five other teams: The Devils, Blackhawks, Blues, Rangers and Canucks.
The Leafs can now focus on doing what needs to be done—selling off just about anything that’s not nailed down over the next six days, leading up to Friday’s trade deadline. With the barren state of their assets cupboard, they should be looking to re-stock, big-time.
More than a dozen Leafs are now on the trade block
Insider Elliotte Friedman said on Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday night that pretty much everyone is on the table… Well, almost everyone.
The word around the Maple leafs now is that they will be widening the scope of what they will consider. Now, I don’t think it’s anything like (Auston) Matthews or (William) Nylander or anything like that. But like I said, the word around them is they are widening their ideas of what they may consider. They are talking a bit more about players with term.
In other words, it’s not just pending unrestricted free agents like Bobby McMann and Scott Laughton. In fact, Daily Faceoff’s latest trade board has no less than 13 Leafs on it. The list looks like this, in order of likelihood of a trade, according to Matt Larkin:
- Bobby McMann
- Simon Benoit
- Scott Laughton
- Brandon Carlo
- Calle Jarnkrok
- Oliver Ekman-Larsson
- Nick Robertson
- Max Domi
- Matias Maccelli
- Anthony Stolarz
- Nicolas Roy
- Morgan Rielly
- Troy Stecher
Rielly, with his no-move clause and $7.5M AAV, seems more like an offseason discussion. The rest of those names all have very reasonable cap hits and could easily be moved.
Are there any Leafs that won’t be dealt?
Maybe it would have been easier to list the players who aren’t expected to be dealt. Those names, if we go by the Daily Faceoff tabulation, would be as follows:
- Auston Matthews
- William Nylander
- Matthew Knies
- John Tavares
- Easton Cowan
- Jake McCabe
- Chris Tanev
- Dakota Joshua
- Joseph Woll
- Dennis Hildeby
That list looks long, but the fact is, all but four of those have no-move or no-trade clauses. Additionally, in the cases of Tanev and Joshua, injury concerns would scare away any potentially interested parties. There’s also a report floating around that Woll is actually a more likely candidate to go from amongst the goaltenders, due to his far greater trade value than Stolarz at this point.
All hands on deck, as the good ship Maple Leaf is in for a rocky ride over the next six days. Perhaps even rockier than the woeful five months that have preceded it.
Related Headlines