The Maple Leafs need to add players, and on the cusp of free agency at noon on Wednesday they have a lot of holes to fill and not much cap space to fill it with. This is the roster as of right now:
Maple Leafs Roster
| Left Wing | Centre | Right Wing | Left Defence | Right Defence | Goalies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ??? | Auston Matthews | Mitch Marner | Jake Muzzin | Justin Holl | Jack Campbell |
| ??? | John Tavares | William Nylander | Morgan Rielly | TJ Brodie | Michael Hutchinson |
| Pierre Engvall | Alexander Kerfoot | Alexander Mikheyev | Travis Dermott | Rasmus Sandin | - |
| Wayne Simmonds | ??? | Jason Spezza | - | - | - |
| - | Adam Brooks | - | - | - | - |
Included is every player under contract who was on the NHL roster reasonably regularly. I included Michael Hutchinson, just to scare myself, and Adam Brooks is the 21st member of the very tight roster because he has a cap hit below this year’s minimum salary.
There are other options already under contract who might be added. Everyone from new free agent Kirill Semyonov to Nick Robertson to Joey Anderson. But that hardly makes this a better roster, just a cheap one.
The players as shown leave $8.6 million in cap space, per CapFriendly’s Armchair GM function.
This is the scale of the job for Kyle Dubas in the next 24 hours. He has to replace Michael Hutchinson and then answer those question marks. He also needs more depth alternates, but they’re the easy part of the job. We might see Dubas re-sign Ben Hutton before the price of depth defenders gets even higher, and I believe the stories that say he’s talking to Nick Foligno right now.
Kyle Dubas has set himself a task more difficult than buying a house in Toronto on a budget. Let’s see how he does.
