With more options at his disposal, it’s now on Craig Berube to get creative and optimize the Leafs’ forward lines

In the lead-up to the trade deadline, the common sentiment around the Maple Leafs was that their top priority was acquiring a 3C to upgrade on Max Domi, who largely played there all season despite making little impact.

I argued for months that the organization’s top priority really should be a top-four right-handed defenseman, but however you want to order them, it was clear that the Leafs needed to fill both needs. Ultimately, they acquired both Scott Laughton and Brandon Carlo, and while they did trade for Laughton first chronologically, it’s telling that they paid more and aimed higher with the Carlo acquisition to improve their defense.

The clear benefit of acquiring a top-four right-handed defenseman is that the defense group falls into place. They already have a strong top pairing with Jake McCabe and Chris Tanev. They added a right-handed shot to play with Morgan Rielly, leaving OEL to drive a third pairing with either Simon Benoit or Philippe Myers, depending on how the Leafs want to match up on any given night against any given opponent. It’s all very logical.

Even though the Leafs acquired a reasonably solid 3C, the roster configuration is still not as straightforward as the defense. 

Since acquiring Laughton, the Leafs have run a third line of McMann – Laughton – Domi, and while I’m not going to jump to any conclusions after two games—at the end of a long road trip, no less—I will ask this: What is the purpose of this line?

The trio isn’t good enough defensively to take on tough matchups to spell their top players. They likely aren’t skilled enough to feel confident that they will consistently produce offense to the point where they are truly dangerous and make any other contender think twice about them in a matchup. Florida, for instance, has Anton Lundell centering their third line—he was fourth on the Panthers last spring with 17 points in the playoffs. The Lightning just added Yanni Gourde and Oliver Bjorkstrand to their third line.

I am not necessarily suggesting those third lines are better, but it’s hard to compare what the Leafs are running and argue that they have a definitive matchup advantage. Sure, they could win the matchup on any given night, but from a shift-to-shift or game-to-game basis, it’s anyone’s guess. The most glass-half-full way of viewing it: Compared to last season’s playoff third line of Robertson – Holmberg – Jarnkrok, they are far less likely to get skunked offensively across the board (last season’s third line didn’t score a playoff goal at five-on-five).

This brings us back to the inevitable conclusion: The Leafs’ top players need to win their head-to-head matchups, and the special teams need to be good. 

The Leafs have the makings of a dominant top line, with an emerging power forward in Matthew Knies, the best goal scorer in the league since he entered it in Auston Matthews, and one of the best two-way wingers in the league in Mitch Marner. But the results so far this season have been a little underwhelming, with a 26-21 goal differential at five-on-five. Just last season, they posted a 24-12 goal differential in about 10 more minutes of shared ice time, so they’ve already given up a ton more on their end, and that’s with much better goaltending this season.

Sometimes, we can get stuck in the fishbowl of only looking at and thinking about the Leafs all the time, leading to unrealistic expectations. I was curious about how the Leafs’ top line stacked up compared to the other playoff teams in the East, so I decided to go through each one.  

A few notes about this exercise: Carolina was a particularly tricky one to place because they’ve had a revolving door around Aho and Jarvis, who have played over 400 minutes together this season. Currently, Jackson Blake is on their wing. Andrei Svechnikov has also played with Aho and Roslovic for about the same number of minutes, and it’s a similar story with big possession numbers and a negative goal differential (they are 8-10). 

New Jersey’s top line is really Jack Hughes with Jesper Bratt and Ondrej Palat, but Hughes is out for the season. If we were to include that line, they played over 500 minutes together this season, posting a 30-21 goal differential and good underlying numbers. 

The rest of the top lines are fairly straightforward in the East. 

To the Leafs’ top players’ credit, they rank at the high end of this list, even with Matthews experiencing a down season. They generally control play and scoring chances, and they win their minutes. You could argue they’ve posted just about the best numbers across the board on average, but the Florida top line is right there with them (and dominates play better), and the Lightning trio has scored the most goals. As usual, that’s the path the Leafs are facing in the playoffs.

But part of the question is not only whether the Leafs’ top line is good—they obviously are—but also whether it is good enough to justify the domino effect down the lineup.

The Leafs’ first line generally controls play well, but they don’t dominate territorially. They are middle-of-the-pack in terms of possession. They outscore opponents but don’t have a dominant goal differential, either. Again, they are good across the board but not dominant.

Last week, the Leafs lost to Vegas and Colorado, who configure their lineups differently. Tanner Pearson was on Jack Eichel’s line. Nathan MacKinnon plays with Martin Necas, but Valerie Nichushkin—arguably the Avalanche’s best winger when he is in the lineup—is driving a separate line altogether (and scored twice against the Leafs). 

Put simply, I don’t know about the return on investment for the Leafs when they play their top left winger, center, and right winger all on the same line. They are good but not great, and then the Leafs consequently run a makeshift third line to go along with a second line that does well enough—because William Nylander carries them offensively—but is out-possessed and out-chanced in the run of play. 

Many of these concerns are moot when the Leafs play bubble teams or worse. An 82-game season in which half of the 32 teams make the playoffs includes many middling opponents, and it can muddy what’s real and what’s not regarding postseason viability. When healthy, the Leafs enter many games with the first, second, and third-best players on either team. They have clear roster advantages without lifting a finger in those situations.

Against the other top teams, what are their roster advantages? Florida certainly wouldn’t fear Aleksander Barkov against Matthews and a Tkachuk-Bennett combination against Tavares-Nylander. It’s the same with the Lightning’s Brayden Point line or the contenders out West the Leafs were just beaten by (with Eichel and MacKinnon). The Leafs could win those matchups, but there’s no clear advantage there.

We could argue the same thing in net, even though the Leafs’ goalies have been excellent this season. Is anyone really taking the Leafs’ tandem over Sergei Bobrovsky or Andrei Vasilevskiy in a seven-game playoff series if given the choice? It’s always possible they could win those matchups—Ilya Samsonov did two years ago!—but there’s no advantage, so to speak.

I don’t think anyone was surprised when the Leafs made their deadline acquisitions and immediately plopped Laughton on the third line while keeping the top line and the Tavares-Nylander duo intact. But it is disappointing, and if they don’t play around with their overall top nine, it’s a missed opportunity across the board.

Unless they really believe that this team was simply tired and the schedule gassed them after only three home games in two months (which is certainly possible), the Leafs aren’t exactly playing well enough recently to the point where they should conclude this lineup is untouchable. Yet, they have approached their lineup with a rigidity that suggests everything is sailing smoothly.

Laughton isn’t a top-six center who opens up a wealth of options, but he’s a credible NHL center capable of producing. He’s recorded 109 points in his last 220 games over 2.5 seasons before joining the Leafs. In that time, he played over 500 five-on-five minutes with Travis Konecny, a duo which carried the play and scoring chances. Laughton is clearly capable of chipping in offensively, and he defends well. 

Hypothetically, are we not going to see him play with, say, William Nylander at any point to find out if the line could work? Nylander has performed well with players worse than Laughton, and they could put a quality left winger on the other side to hedge it a bit.

This allows them to move Tavares to the 3C spot to see if he can drive consistent offense in that role. Last season, he went down to 3C for a stretch with Bobby McMann and Nick Robertson. They outscored opponents 4-1, and we never saw them again.

Tavares is producing a great season; it’s not a knock on him to shift him into the role. This is about not going two weeks without the current third line producing anything, and the trade-off of being worse up the lineup for parts of the game is likely a net positive if Tavares is driving consistent offense from the third line. It’s not as if Tavares would never play with Nylander again. They would surely pair up at times throughout the game, regardless. 

As for the top line, again, have they been so dominant to the point that they can’t ever be split up? There have been lots of injury-related excuses directed at Matthews, and there likely is some truth to it, but this is a results-based business, and we’re heading down the final stretch of the regular season. At a certain point, we have to accept the reality of the situation as it is this season. 

Bobby McMann moved up for a spell beside Matthews and Marner and did not look out of place. Calle Jarnkrok played with Matthews and Marner for 164 minutes over his first two years, and the trio won their minutes 10-5. If moving those players up the lineup to play with Matthews and Marner nets the same types of results—they hold their own in tough matchups, win the minutes, but don’t dominate—and the team benefits from moving Knies to a different line—where we have seen him flash dominance down the lineup in weaker matchups—it’s a net win for the team. 

The Leafs could take it a step further and split up Matthews and Marner, too. The roster was too limited earlier in the season, but with Jarnkrok returning and the Laughton acquisition, there’s enough to spread it out. Their only limitation is their lack of creativity. 

The Leafs will have to play their top players together when push comes to shove; meaning, Knies will play with Matthews and Marner in critical situations, and Tavares will be with Nylander. There is no getting around it. They will go down with their best and let the cards fall where they may.

But over 60-minute games with a fairly deep forward group now, we’re seeing the same old, same old so far. Marner and Nylander are pacing for the second-highest time on ice per game marks of their careers. Auston Matthews is right where he always is. At his current pace, John Tavares will average his highest time on ice in five years.

Meanwhile, useful players are awkwardly forced together down the lineup, and it’s playing out pretty much as expected. This isn’t to suggest it’s a black-and-white situation in which they should stop using these current lines and use these other ones instead; it’s to suggest they have more options at their disposal than they are thus far willing to explore, and they are leaving advantages on the table as a result.

The Leafs have quality forwards who can drive lines up and down a top-nine grouping. They can easily start games that way and revert to their standard pairings at any point when necessary. But so far, the plan has essentially been to bunch all the best players together up the lineup, play them a ton of minutes, and don’t look back. 

Maybe now that the road gauntlet is over, the Leafs will settle into some normalcy, return to full health finally, the third line will gel, and everything will come together at the exact right time. There is an argument to be made about giving it some time and veterans elevating in the spring. But the top line will need to be excellent for this current plan to come together, which they haven’t been this season and haven’t been in any playoff of this era.

So, what’s the backup plan?