The Toronto Maple Leafs had an extraordinarily busy July 1st this year. They opened up the morning by trading Nick Robertson to the Pittsburgh Penguins for a draft pick, and they followed that up with the high-risk signing of veteran star goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky to a three-year deal. I’ve written my thoughts on both, as linked in the prior sentence.
What we didn’t touch on were the forward additions, and boy, there a lot of them.
The Maple Leafs acquired the following forwards on Wednesday:
- Jack Roslovic, 29, signed for two years at a $4,000,000 AAV
- Colton Sissons, 32, signed for two years at a $4,250,000 AAV
- Teddy Blueger, 31, signed for two years at a $2,500,000 AAV
- Brandon Duhaime, 29, signed for three years at a $2,600,000 AAV
- Zack MacEwen, 29, signed for two years at an $875,000 AAV
- Nick Paul, 31, was acquired from the Tampa Bay Lightning for Dennis Hildeby, a 2028 third-round pick, and a 2027 fourth-round pick.
Roslovic packs the most offensive punch of the group. Once touted to be a high-end offensive prospect with the Winnipeg Jets, the Columbus native has made a couple of stops around the league and settled in as a middle-six forward, averaging out to be about a 20-20 player over an average 82-game season. This past year with the Edmonton Oilers was his best from a goal scoring perspective, scoring 21 in 69 games.
Roslovic has generally been typecast as a scoring-first winger, who has routinely seen poor defensive results when he’s on the ice. His microtraits have been a mixed bag year-over-year – last season saw him display a strong transition game combined with some surprising playmaking numbers, but he’s gone back and forth between good and bad in both these regards across his time in Columbus and Carolina, leaving one to wonder of his playstyle is systems-dependent. One would assume that he’s coming in here to replace elements of the departed Robertson, Mattias Maccelli, and potentially LTIRed Max Domi.
After him, the focus in the group greatly shifts to the other side of the ice.
Sissons came with by far the biggest sticker shock of the group, compared to his role and responsiblity. Never really a big-minute player, he’s seen his deployment diminish in Nashville and Las Vegas in two consecutive years. He’s a player that’s never cleared 15 goals or 35 points, and had just 11 points in 66 regular season games this past season. His playoffs were more productive, with two goals and six assists in 22 games, though all the goals and the points came in the first round against Utah.
In every year of his career, Sissons’ teams have been had a lower share of the shot attempts with him on the ice than off of it, though he has largely been used in defensive-driven deployment. He’s also rather adept at the faceoff dot, winning 53.7% of his draws over his career, including a 56.6% rate across the regular season and playoffs with the Golden Knights this season.
Sissons’ $4.25 million price tag, for reference is nearly triple what The Athletic’s model projects his impacts at. Being good on the faceoff dot and going to the Stanley Cup Final have always been great inflators, but to commit that much to a player projected to play on the fourth line is very curious.
Teddy Blueger’s signing is more reasonable from a projected-dollar-figure perspective, though I wonder just what he’s expected to contribute beyond being an absence-of-hockey type. Blueger, eight years into his career, has yet to post a 10 goal or 30-piont season – his paces this year were trending to clear both, but attached to individual and on-ice shooting percentages well above his career averages. He’s never been a strong passer, transition player, or puck retriever, and while he isn’t not-physical, he’s not overly imposing in that sense either. Historically, his job has been, like Sissons, to start in the d-zone and get out unscathed.
Duhaime, once again, is a player who has never hit ten goals, with a career high of 21 points in 2024/25 that he failed to get halfway to last year. He’s yet another player who shot metrics aren’t friendly to, but more so in the “lack of offence” sense than the “porous defence” sense. What he will do is skate, check, and fight – he’s been fairly effective in retrieving pucks since jumping from Minnesota to Washington, he’s a safe bet for 150-200 hits a season, and he’s dropped the gloves eighteen times in the last two years. Another fighter was inevitable, and at least it’s not a Ryan Reaves situation and you get the player with some miles on him as an actual player.
MacEwen almost definitely finds himself as a AAAA option. He’s primarily been in the NHL over the past few years, though how many games he’s played has been a different question – notably, he only played three for the New Jersey Devils last year. When he has played in the AHL, he’s been pretty good, posting 122 points in 190 games, including 16 in 23 with Belleville in 2024/25. Maybe he gets the 13th forward treatment if there’s some housecleaning to be done, but I see him with the Marlies.
Lastly, you get the trade. Nick Paul is a name that has haunted Leafs fans until yesterday. For those who have tried to forget, Paul both goals, including the series-winning goal against Toronto in Game 7 of the first round of the 2022 Playoffs – you know, the Justin Holl / John Tavares interference goal game.
Before and after this, Paul has actually shaped himself out to be a pretty useful third-line centre, showing flashes of his capability with Ottawa before the Lightning traded for him during that 2022 season, followed by a seven-year contract extension. Toronto absorbs the final three years of that deal at a $3,150,000 cap hit. Tampa Bay needed the space because they were looking to sign John Carlson, but that doesn’t necessarily make the contract a bad one.
In fact, I think this might be one of the better bets Toronto makes for this year. While it would be easy for me to point out that Paul was also in the under 10 goal, under 20 point club this season, he also missed 31 games and could easily put some blame on puck luck this year. His 10.3 individual shooting percentage is over four points lower than his average across his 310 games in Tampa, and a similar dip can be seen in his 8.3% on-ice conversion (Tampa career average: 11.5%). It’s not hard to see a timeline where he rebounds back into a 40-50 point third line centre, which in lieu of giving John Tavares some ability to slide down the lineup, at least gives him and Auston Matthews a bit of support beneath them.
I still think Justin Holl should sue the NHL for this game.
Now, with that last sentence said, we start to unravel a bit of the problem here. In Paul’s most productive year, his most frequent linemates were Steven Stamkos, Mikey Eyssimont, Brandon Hagel and Anthony Cirelli. In his second most productive year, he had Hagel, Cirelli, Mitchell Chaffee, and Gage Goncalves. So he’s been able to produce a bit with young and eager depth, but he’s also spent his time with some good players too. This isn’t even to call him a passenger – his role isn’t to be an imposing scorer – but it seems like the optimal Nick Paul line has at least one offensively solid linemate.
Then you look back at the other five signings. If you assume Roslovic will be playing wing on one of the top two lines, similar to what Edmonton had some success with when putting him with Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl at times last season, you don’t really have a lot of offence sitting in the bottom six.
More specifically, your battle for minutes in those bottom two lines consists of the incoming Paul, Sissons, Blueger, Duhaime, MacEwen and the incumbent Easton Cowan, Dakota Joshua and Steven Lorentz. The popular refrain of “we have too many okay offensive players” in the past few days as Maccelli and Robertson departed now feels like it’s swung the other way, with too many defensive swiss-army knives. To the Paul-specific issue, Cowan might be of some help, but it still leaves an overall offensive void in the bottom half of the lineup.
Sure, it provides some purpose, and there are individual utilities that most of the acquisitions have. But it’s reminiscent of the same “let the stars handle it” offensive plan that the team gradually transitioned into midway through the Dubas-Keefe era. In terms of climbing out of the basement, this is helpful – less defensive responsibility for Auston Matthews and company is great on a day-to-day basis when you’re facing different teams every night, and likely helps gets the most out of them.
But then there’s playoff time – some people see these new signings and see a better playoff team than before because they’re grittier, more defensive, harder working than past iterations of the bottom of the lineup – but that’s also what we said about the past iterations until it didn’t work. What I see is a setup where teams that will see the Leafs every night in a playoff series can focus the game plan on smothering the stars, knowing that if the game is left to the depth players, they’re not all that likely to create their own goals. This is something that has repeatedly come to pass over the years.
Defensive utility was the name of the game with Wednesday’s Leafs forward acquisitions.
Individually I see little things to like in these players. I see arguments for making one or two of the moves in concert with trying to find a few more playmakers and finishers to create a third productive line, similar to the first few years of the Matthews era. I also see what the team is aiming for in building the bottom six in this mold. I just don’t know if it’s the best idea. I also don’t see the urgency to commit all of your current cap space in the first four and a half hours if these are the archetypes you’re chasing, unless you’re absolutely certain that these are difference makers. Outside of the league’s most elite, defensive or grit-focused depth players are typically pretty handily available throughout the summer, or make regular appearances on the trade market for an opportunistic team to pounce on.
Maybe the Leafs have something else brewing. After all, they have over three months until opening night to make a couple moves, after showing themselves capable of making eight in five hours. I’ll also give the caveat that none of these terms lock them into these players forever – many are the type I’d prefer to go one year at a time on, but two and three are short enough to parachute out of if they don’t work.
For now, though, I’m more cautious than celebratory here, because the choices themselves are so cautious. These are moves that, if their best players are healthy, give the forward group the ability to help dig out of the basement and back into the playoff conversation. But I don’t know that they’ve actually put them much closer to returning to the contender class. The roster is beginning to feel once again like one that will attempt to react to opponents, rather than assert itself, and one that will lack a backup plan if their top guns can’t carry them.
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