The Maple Leafs Report to Camp as a Team Nobody Recognizes

Toronto missed the playoffs last spring for the first time since 2015-16, finished last in the Atlantic Division at 32-36-14, and then spent five months rebuilding the front office, the bench, the crease and the top of the prospect pipeline. When the Leafs open camp with split-squad preseason games against Montreal on Sept. 19, almost nothing about the operation will look the way it did in April.

Brad Treliving was fired March 30. MLSE replaced him on May 3 with John Chayka as general manager and brought Mats Sundin back as senior executive adviser for hockey operations, handing the two of them the coaching search as their first joint assignment. They landed on Jim Hiller, who takes over from Craig Berube. Daniel Alfredsson came the other way from Ottawa to join Hiller’s staff as associate coach, which is its own small piece of theatre given how those two fan bases feel about each other.

McKenna changes the timeline

Then the lottery balls fell Toronto’s way. The Leafs won the draft lottery and used the No. 1 pick on Gavin McKenna, the Whitehorse, Yukon forward who spent last season at Penn State and became the sixth NCAA player ever taken first overall. McKenna has been the presumptive top pick in this class for years, and he arrives in a market that has not had a genuine blue-chip forward prospect of its own to argue about in a very long time.

A rebuilding team does not usually pair a No. 1 pick with a 37-year-old goaltender, but Chayka did exactly that. Toronto signed Sergei Bobrovsky to a three-year, $21 million contract on July 1, giving the NHL’s biggest available unrestricted free agent $7 million against the cap through 2028-29. Bobrovsky is coming off the worst season of his career, a .877 save percentage across 51 games for Florida. He also has back-to-back Stanley Cups on his résumé from 2024 and 2025, and Toronto’s goaltending has been an unresolved argument for the better part of a decade.

A supporting cast built for a different kind of season

The rest of the additions are less glamorous and probably more revealing. Defenceman Darren Raddysh signed one of the seven eight-year contracts handed out league-wide this summer. Up front, the Leafs brought in Nick Paul, Jack Roslovic, Colton Sissons and Teddy Blueger, a group that is heavy on defensive responsibility and light on anyone who needs the puck. Samuel Ersson went to Ottawa on June 26 for a 2027 fifth-round pick. Morgan Rielly’s role in the new structure is one of the open questions heading into camp.

Easton Cowan, who has spent the past two summers waiting for a real opening, sounds like a player who thinks he has finally found one. “There’s a buzz around Toronto and everyone’s excited,” he told TSN this week. “We’ve got a good team here and we’re looking to prove it.” Cowan said he spent the offseason on his speed and on puck battles, and that the added games from last season taught him what his body needs. “The extra games helped me out a lot,” he said. “Making sure my body felt well was a big learning curve.”

Toronto opens the regular season on Sept. 29 at home against Montreal, one half of the all-Canadian doubleheader the league built its opening night around. Whatever the Leafs are now, the country finds out on a Tuesday night against the Canadiens.

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