Defense or Starting Goaltender: What Should the Maple Leafs Prioritize in NHL Free Agency?
The Toronto Maple Leafs are sure to look a lot different next season beyond the hiring of Craig Berube as their new head coach.
The club will have approximately $19.7 million to spend on their lineup and it's expected that the bulk of it will go to shoring up their defense and goaltending.
The Maple Leafs have just four defensemen locked up for next season. Morgan Rielly ($7.5 million), Jake McCabe ($2 million), Simon Benoit ($1.35 million) and Conor Timmins ($1.1 million) are the only defensemen signed for Toronto for 2024-25. Joseph Woll is the lone goaltender under contract ($766,667) with NHL experience. That leaves Maple Leafs GM Brad Treliving with room to work with in his quest to fill out and remake the team.
There's been a lot of talk about the current crop of free-agent defensemen available pending free agents like Brandon Montour and Chris Tanev are seen as players who would fit Treliving's vision.
But what about goaltending?
The crop of unrestricted free-agent goalies available is quite bare with Winnipeg Jets goalie Laurent Brossoit seen as a bit of a safe bet to play in tandem with the oft-injured Joseph Woll. But is that the best option? When you include restricted free-agent goaltenders available, the list expands a bit. There's one goaltender who jumps off the page...Jeremy Swayman.
Extracting Swayman from the Boston Bruins is virtually impossible. An offer sheet would have been viable had the Leafs had their second and third-round draft picks this year to offer as compensation. But because they don't, they would need to offer any RFA $11,452,295 in average annual value to have the requisite compensation for an offer sheet (four first-round picks) and no goaltender right now is worth that kind of money.
Outside of the underwhelming unrestricted free agents, a trade would be the likeliest route to get a big-name goaltender.
Swayman is probably not going anywhere and would likely receive a substantial raise from his $3.475 million salary cap hit from last season. His .933 save percentage in 12 playoffs games proved he's the guy in Boston now. So maybe Linus Ullmark could become available? He has $5 million and one season remaining on his contract but has a 15-team no-move clause.
That leaves Calgary Flames goaltender Jacob Markstrom and Nashville Predators netminders Juuse Saros as the big-game goalies. Like Ullmark, Saros has $5 million and one year left on his deal. Any deal with the Flames and Brad Treliving appears difficult to consummate. There could be a fit with the Predators and Maple Leafs on some sort of deal, although the feeling in Nashville is they'd prefer to try to make a deal work with their goalie.
There seems to be one logical way the Leafs could get a big-name goalie while shoring up their defense in a major way, and that would be trading Mitch Marner Of course, that would require a big enough return where Toronto felt compelled to go to the star forward and request that he waive his no-movement clause. This could be easier said than done.
When you look at success in the playoffs and deep runs, it always comes with solid goaltending. There's no question the Leafs have that in Woll. It's more of an issue of his dependability given his lengthy injury history.
Woll looked like the savior Toronto needed until an innocent save at the end of Game 6 made him unavailable in the net for Game 7.
No disrespect to Brossoit or any of the other UFA goalies out there, but it's not a solution in goal. The Leafs need a proven starter while they see if Woll's lack of availability is due to bad luck or something worse.
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