Last week, we looked at the Mitch Marner situation and the possible paths forward.
One of those options—Marner not returning, and the Leafs weaponizing the cap space—requires further exploration, especially since it appears more likely than not that a divorce is imminent between the two parties. I haven’t completely ruled out a Marner return, but the whole point of this Offseason Evaluation Series is to explore the Leafs‘ options this summer, including the real possibility of Marner leaving.
What are the Leafs (potentially) losing?
The conversation must begin with what exactly the Leafs would be losing in Mitch Marner. For many, the discussion will start with the playoff performance, but it really needs to begin in the regular season. After all, the team needs to qualify for the postseason before we can talk about what happens in the playoffs.
In the regular season, Marner is an elite player.
Over the past five seasons, he is seventh in the NHL in points and third in the league in assists. He’s also been remarkably healthy, missing just 26 games out of 466 — and he was rested for at least three or four of those, too.
Marner has also led the Leafs‘ forward group in ice time per game in each of the past five seasons. He plays and produces a ton. His absence will clearly be felt, and it will probably shake up the team’s entire deployment strategy.
Craig Berube, in particular, leaned on Marner heavily. He arguably played the toughest overall minutes in the league this year. Among forwards who played 1,000+ minutes, Marner stands alone in terms of quality of competition. The chart below is a good visual representation; we can see Marner at the very top on the axis of quality competition:
This should come as no surprise to fans who followed the team throughout the 2024-25 season. The Leafs hard-matched Marner against the opponent’s top lines all year, regardless of whether Auston Matthews was in the lineup.
Marner was unquestionably good in his minutes, outscoring opponents 62-44 overall at five-on-five in the first season of his career when he took more defensive-zone faceoffs than offensive-zone faceoffs.
On the power play, he was arguably even more effective. While the Leafs’ man advantage got off to a rocky start to the season, they really took off when they used Marner on the point. He finished tied for 10th in the league in power-play points as he quarterbacked the Leafs’ top power-play unit, providing a marked upgrade over what Morgan Rielly was providing. He has great vision and owns a sneaky wrister through traffic, making him a dangerous power-play QB.
Marner also led all Leafs forwards in shorthanded time on ice per game. Its effectiveness is debatable, though, as the Leafs ranked a middling 17th on the penalty kill, and among regular forwards on the PK, Marner posted the highest goals against per 60. Marner is really effective at reading the play with high-end defensive instincts, but he was also sixth among Leafs forwards in blocked shots (seventh if we include Scott Laughton’s totals for the season), and he doesn’t play or defend particularly fast; I’d consider doing at least one of those two things well is a critical part of being a high-end penalty killer.
These are all important qualifiers. The Leafs must fully understand what they are potentially losing — it goes far beyond the simple point totals — when it’s a player this significant, before they can work toward not just replacing or recreating him but finding a way to improve.
The Leafs’ territorial play, and Berube’s systems/deployment
At the risk of sounding like Paul DePodesta in Moneyball when the A’s lost Johnny Damon, moving Marner off the payroll opens up a whole world of possibilities.
Throughout the season, when healthy, the Leafs insisted on playing their top left winger, top center, and top right winger together. While they played well, they weren’t exactly elite on the whole.
The top line did score the sixth-most goals of any line as a trio, but they gave up the 11th-most the other way. Among lines that played at least 200 minutes together, Knies-Matthews-Marner ranked 29th in goals for percentage and didn’t finish within the top 10 in either goals per 60 (15th) or goals against per 60 (43rd). They also ranked 43rd in raw shot attempt share.
Was it a good line that had tough deployment and won their minutes? Yes. Did they dominate or play to the level of an elite line relative to their roughly $25 million combined salary (which included one player on an ELC)? No.
The Leafs were 29th in five-on-five possession as a team, and they were running a really expensive top line that didn’t dominate play. Everything trickled down from there. We could see it play out in the playoffs regularly, as the team was outplayed for entire periods, and the top line wouldn’t exactly tilt the ice the other way in response. Really, the one time they memorably accomplished this was in the first period of Game 6 against the Panthers.
Sure, the Leafs’ other lines were also not great at driving play, but when their top players all play together and they don’t dominate, either, how are they building an advantage at any point?
As a result of continually getting out-possessed, the Leafs took the third-fewest offensive zone faceoffs in the league this past season. The Carolina Hurricanes were first and took a whopping 395 more, or roughly five more per game.
For me, the number-one topic of the offseason has to be how bad the Leafs were at controlling play territorially in 2024-25. It’s one thing to be average and trust their talent to take it from there, but they were decidedly underwhelming and relied heavily on defending the high-danger area, plus their goaltending. It will not be a sustainable formula year to year in the absence of a genuinely elite goaltender (it would be hard to argue the Leafs own one).
Shoring up their forward quality up and down the lineup is critical in pointing the arrow the right way, which is really where the opportunities open up for the Leafs.
Craig Berube wants the Leafs to be a heavy, forechecking team, and that’s not really Marner’s game. He posted the worst raw possession numbers of his career this past season under this system (which is partly due to deployment). While Matthew Knies would hound a puck in deep, Matthews and Marner didn’t do it nearly enough. As one example, Justin Bourne clipped a dump-in against Florida where Marner slowed down through the neutral zone, making him late to the corner, while Matthews was literally skating backwards as the puck was about to be shot in.
It’s not just Marner, to be fair. William Nylander and Max Domi forecheck when they feel like it, at best; from game to game, it’s anyone’s guess if they actually will. Calle Jarnkrok and David Kampf are pros who will try, but they aren’t exactly great at it. The Leafs have seven forwards under contract right now, and the above-mentioned players are four of them.
Armed with cap space, the Leafs should be asking all sorts of questions about their deployment and personnel moving forward. Again, we will repeat these goals all summer: three proper lines and improving their ability to control the five-on-five play.
Due to a lack of depth, the Leafs went head-to-head all season, which didn’t just apply to their top line. Berube would match a pretty straightforward L1 vs. L1 and L2 vs. L2 across the board, followed by a heavily-sheltered offensive line that usually featured Max Domi and Nick Robertson, and a defensive-zone line that they’d alternate based on the situation more than the opponent (i.e., the fourth line takes defensive-zone faceoffs vs. the opponent’s third lines rather than going L3 vs. L3 all the time). The Leafs simply weren’t deep enough to do much else.
Now, compare this deployment to the Stanley Cup finalists. The Panthers were more than happy to match their Anton Lundell-led third line against the Matthews unit to shake up their matchups mid-series. In the first round, Adrian Kempe racked up 10 points in six games, so the Oilers shifted the matchup around and adjusted as they went along. Four forwards not named McDavid played more than McDavid did against Kempe at five-on-five.
Now, at the end of the day, the Panthers did run Aleksander Barkov against Matthews down the stretch of the series, and nobody played more against Jack Eichel or Mikko Rantanen at five-on-five in the Oilers’ subsequent series than Connor McDavid. Let’s not blow this out of proportion. The Leafs are not hiding their stars, let alone one who is one of the highest-paid players in the league and legitimately good defensively. However, the Leafs really didn’t have many options in general due to a lack of depth needed to shift it around on their bench or make the opponent think twice on the other side.
There is still a month or so for the trade market to develop and for us to fully understand who will even hit the UFA market, so I don’t want to get way ahead of myself by jumping down the rabbit hole of replacing Marner with players X, Y, and Z. But we can outline a framework of a Leafs team without Marner, which is still a lot better than people are giving credit.
The Leafs own a strong goaltending tandem, a solid veteran defense that helped lead the team to the third-fewest five-on-five goals against in the league, a top-10 right winger and top-10 center, and some other useful players already locked in, along with an emerging power forward who has the potential to develop into a star.
I’d hope the plan is far more creative than finding a low-budget replacement for Marner on the top line, potentially keeping Tavares-Nylander together on L2, and paying to upgrade L3 (for once). There is an opportunity to rethink the entire lineup, from more time for Matthews and Nylander together, to Knies driving his own line, to not leaving their third line as a sheltered offensive unit incapable of anything more than scoring against lottery teams.
A world without Mitch Marner
Anticipating a life without Marner in Toronto, I’d be thinking along the following lines if I were the Leafs:
– Stylistically, the Leafs were not particularly fast, nor did they consistently forecheck well. Those things may go hand-in-hand; it requires speed to get in on the forecheck. Marner and Tavares are both excellent players, but Marner plays slowly, constantly looking to bring the game down to his pace, and Tavares is a slower player at this point in his career. Without both, it blows a hole in their lineup with a chance to become a heck of a lot faster.
– Similar to the speed angle, can the Leafs, again, find some players who can actually drive play in the Berube system by forechecking and grinding pucks in the offensive zone? When Berube took over the St. Louis Blues, there was an initial adjustment period before they took off. In their final 45 games of the season, they went 30-10-5, were second in the league in expected goals at five-on-five, and finished seventh in Corsi. They outscored opponents a ridiculous 97-65, the highest goals for percentage in the league. The Blues’ roster featured really good players, but they weren’t superstars. There were a lot of heavy-on-the-puck types who hounded on the forecheck: Ryan O’Reilly, David Perron, Vladimir Tarasenko, Brayden Schenn, Ivan Barbashev, Patrick Maroon, Oskar Sundqvist, and even Sammy Blais in the Cup run. More than half of the group were mid-level salary players.
– Can the Leafs finally construct a proper third line through a more normal cap allocation? Ideally, a genuinely good checking line could free up Matthews a bit, alleviating pressure from the top line and allowing the Leafs to play around with the matchups.
– How much better would this make the top line in general? Again, Knies-Matthews-Marner were good last season, but they weren’t dominant. If Matthews is healthy next season (a story in and of itself), how much does this alone mitigate a Marner loss? Matthews has 106 and 107-point seasons beside his name. He produced 78 last season and a career-low 33 goals. If he’s healthy, Matthews will produce a lot more.
– It will sound a little counterintuitive at first, but I wonder, with more cap space to allocate to the second and third lines, if the Leafs can actually spread it out now, as they, in part, ask Matthews to carry lesser players and perhaps become more open to bumping quality players down and around the lineup. Berube, like Sheldon Keefe before him, was so fixated on the Matthews-Marner combo (which I believe is telling on other levels); they were always the focal point, and everything revolved around Marner’s minutes. Without Marner and by spreading out their cap dollars more, it would force them into a different approach on the whole.
– Ignore the noise about the penalty kill. Marner is a solid penalty killer, but this is getting overblown. It often seems like the PK is tacked on to make Marner’s potential loss sound even bigger than it needs to be. This has been a middling-to-mediocre unit for a few years now, and the PK has largely been carved up in the playoffs during his tenure. Both Matthews and Knies demonstrated that they can kill penalties well this season, and it was really the first season of doing it for both (and Matthews did it injured all season). Scott Laughton is a legitimately strong penalty killer. Calle Jarnkrok is, too, if they keep him. They can find high-quality penalty killers on the market for under $3 million, and there are even a few high-end players available this summer who are also quality penalty killers. Tack on all of Tanev, McCabe, Benoit, and Carlo returning on defense, along with a high-quality goalie tandem, and anyone who mentions the PK in relation to the calamity of Marner leaving is simply telling on themselves at that point.
– The power play seems more likely to take a hit, but even then, should it really be so bad when it’s flanked by prime Nylander and prime Matthews, with Knies in front? Whenever their power play was down one of their three mouths to feed, they actually moved the puck better, and it didn’t feel like there were too many cooks in the kitchen anymore. Marner missed one game last season, and the Leafs went 2/4 on the power play after scoring two really nice goals. If anything, it would be interesting to see if the Leafs could somehow acquire a big shot to play on the point of the top unit.
Losing a 102-point player will hurt at times, and there is no getting around it. But I can’t ignore the team getting territorially outplayed pretty well all season long at a lottery team level and believe that the only real option to continue their regular-season success is paying up for Marner and running it back. The odds of finishing 29th in five-on-five possession and winning the division multiple years in a row are slim to none. It’s not a recipe for sustained success. That’s not all on Marner, but freeing up a ton of cap space to address the team’s issues presents a real opportunity.
It’s one thing to lose talent because the team simply can’t afford it. Such a scenario puts a franchise in a tough spot because it is losing the talent and is forced to backfill the hole by budget shopping. That’s not the case here. The Leafs are flush with cash and cap space this summer; they would just need to find different ways to spend it.
It could end horribly when it’s all said and done, and it’s no guarantee that Leafs management will get this right. But this isn’t a lost cause, by any stretch. The team just won the Atlantic and gave a powerhouse Florida team their toughest test in the conference. They defend really well, and their best player performed well below his usual standard all season (although it’s fair to wonder if he will ever be truly healthy moving forward). Pretty well all of the Leafs’ key players from last season are under team control save for two, and one of them — in all likelihood — wants to stay on a discount.
The Leafs would have the cap space to do more than just fill gaps. They would have the opportunity to allocate their cap books differently and potentially reshape their roster construction, style of play, and deployment.
