After initial step in the right direction, Maple Leafs take two steps back at NHL Trade Deadline
Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brad Treliving entered this year’s NHL Trade Deadline in an unenviable position. Of course, this is largely a consequence of his own making. As the Maple Leafs slumped out of playoff contention, it became abundantly clear that the team ought to be positioned as sellers, with the idea of re-tooling. Treliving and the MLSE brass appeared to be the last ones to realize that the 2025-26 Maple Leafs campaign was a lost cause. There is no place worse than the mushy middle and after an initial step in the right direction, the Maple Leafs took two steps back, descending into the dreaded no man’s land.
Treliving traded Nicolas Roy to the Colorado Avalanche on Thursday, in exchange for a 2027 conditional first-round pick and 2026 conditional fifth-round pick. It’s a top-10 protected pick, and no one expects the vaunted Avalanche to fall off anytime soon. This could be celebrated as a step in the right direction, although critics will point out that Roy was acquired in a last-second trade with the Vegas Golden Knights, preventing the Maple Leafs from walking away from the Mitch Marner era completely empty-handed. Roy didn’t fit into Craig Berube’s system, and he’s a more useful player for the contending Avalanche, than he is for a Maple Leafs team stuck in flux.
If this were the only move Treliving made, the deadline would be incomplete. Would that be preferable to the sum of Friday’s moves? Bobby McMann was traded to the Seattle Kraken in exchange for a 2026 fourth-round pick and 2027 second-round pick. McMann was widely considered one of the best available unrestricted free agents this summer and possesses blazing straight-line speed. Toronto was expected to recoup a first-round pick for McMann. By itself, it wasn’t the worst return, as the Maple Leafs continued to accrue draft capital. Considering that McMann was on the verge of signing an extension with the Maple Leafs, it read as if Treliving scrambled to find the bare minimum.
“I’ll take responsibility,” Treliving told reporters at the Ford Performance Centre following Friday’s deadline. “We met earlier in the year, through about the 20-game mark, when we got off to a slow start. The failures here start with me. Once we get through the end of the season, there will be all sorts of evaluation. To start parsing through it right now, we’ve got games to play. We got off to a poor start. I look from my standpoint, some roster construction issues. lack of consistency. The ability to maintain any kind of level, there’s been a whole bunch of factors. We’ll get to that in due course.”
The most egregious deal came just before the clock expired: Scott Laughton was traded to the Los Angeles Kings for a conditional third-round pick. Laughton was acquired at last year’s deadline in exchange for a 2027 first-round pick and forward Nikita Grebenkin. This was terrible asset management from Treliving, even if the 31-year-old has more value on a playoff team. Laughton wanted to remain with the Maple Leafs, he was the team’s best penalty killer, universally liked by his teammates. Considering last year’s acquisition cost, and the fact that Berube never played Laughton anywhere but fourth-line centre this year, the Leafs took two steps back with the McMann and Laughton trades, respectively.
Toronto appears to be stuck in the middle, ahead of the 2025-26 season. Although the team will be weakened in the short-term with three roster players on the move, the Maple Leafs almost certainly won’t be porous enough to stagger into the bottom five. Toronto’s first-round pick, of course, belongs to the Boston Bruins after the Brandon Carlo-Fraser Minten trade, another deal that looks horrific a year later, even if the thinking to go all-in was considered to be reasonable. What’s becoming abundantly clear is that even if Treliving understands which way the team is trending, he still routinely gets fleeced in trades, or can’t assess correct market value before his peers do.
“This team for a number of years has been adding at this time of the year and today was a day to try to regain some assets,” Treliving said. “At the end of the day, we were trying to be as active as we could to obtain and acquire as many young assets as we could. We were able to do what we were able to do.”
Are the Maple Leafs positioned to be flexible for the foreseeable future? The prevailing logic is that a team led by Auston Matthews and William Nylander is still too talented to bottom out. Let this season be an exercise in hubris, then. Montreal and Buffalo are poised to rule the division for the foreseeable future, Tampa Bay is making another concerted push, Detroit improved at the deadline, while Boston is ahead of Toronto in its retooling stage, aided by last year’s deadline deal. Only the Ottawa Senators share an equally bleak outlook, and they have a much younger core to build around. It was an unenviable position to be in, but under Treliving’s supervision, the Maple Leafs took one step forward and two steps back at the deadline.
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