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My Trade Proposals Suck

MTPS: Whoa Canada, Part One: Taking Advantage of Toronto’s Meltdown

Toronto is melting down, the knives are out, and draft picks are suddenly looking very tempting. If the Rangers decide to sell, here’s how they could turn the Leafs’ panic into long-term leverage.

Chip23

Chip23

— 8 min read
MTPS: Whoa Canada, Part One: Taking Advantage of Toronto’s Meltdown
© Jerome Miron-Imagn Images

While the Eastern Conference tries its best to put the FUN in dysfunction, perhaps no team is more ripe for a plucking than the dumpster fire that is the Toronto Maple Leafs.

To quote Kane Brown, "I've been wrong about a million times but I got one thing right."

That one thing? The death of the Toronto Maple Leafs:

Every year there's at least one team that people think is going to be good that turns out to be caca. Last year, despite throwing out big money on Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov, Boston was that team. Whether you want to blame it on Jeremy Swayman's holdout or just bad luck, a team that was supposed to contend for the President's Trophy was closer to contending for the first overall pick.
This year I'm calling Toronto. If we're being honest, once you get by Matthew Knies, Auston Matthews, and William Nylander, the Leafs have a sneaky bad team. Their goaltending is questionable at best and their defensive players are old, slow, or both. Toronto added grit at the trade deadline and doubled down on it over the summer by adding guys like Nick Roy and Dakota Joshua. Seriously, take a look at their projected top six and tell me this is a team that's going to keep pace this season.

The Maple Leafs have been a train wreck. The eye test doesn't like them, the analytics don't like them, and the fans certainly don't like them:

When the Leafs lose Bissonnette...it's bad. Lots of chatter about whether or not Craig Berube and/or Brad Treliving should be shown the door and many of the same fan and media voices that had the knives out for Mitchell Marner for years—blaming him for everything from playoff losses to the 1917 Halifax Explosion—have now shifted their focus to Auston Matthews.

Their trade of Fraser Minton and a top five protected 2026 first round pick for Brandon Carlo looks like an abject disaster, and their decision to drive Marner out of town and replace him with "grit" has buried them. They have no farm system, no draft picks until the third round, Matthews is not at 100 percent and, at times, his frustration has seeped into his play. William Nylander sounds and looks like he's broken.

In short, friends, they sound a lot like the New York Rangers have for the past twelve months.

But, that's their problem. And I don't get paid no money to care about their problems. I get paid no money to care about New York Rangers problems, and a desperate and not terribly bright Toronto front office could solve a lot of the Rangers problems by doubling down on some of the mistakes that they've already made.

What makes the Toronto situation so interesting is that, whether the Rangers are buyers or sellers, they're still in position to take advantage of Toronto if they play their cards right.

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