Maple Leafs make initial cuts to the 2017 roster

As promised, the Leafs have finally trimmed their roster down to something close to regulation size.

Toronto carried an unusually large number of players right through the final preseason game, a shootout loss to Detroit on Saturday night.  This let the Leafs rest many of their players on the Friday/Saturday back-to-back, but also gave them the maximum amount of time to evaluate some pretty competitive training camp battles.

The cuts so far leave the roster at 26.  More decisions have to be made.

The cuts to send waiver exempt players to the Marlies today are:

• Miro Aaltonen
• Travis Dermott
• Frederik Gauthier
• Justin Holl
• Andreas Johnsson
• Kasperi Kapanen
• Tobias Lindberg
• Mason Marchment
• Trevor Moore
• Andrew Nielsen
• Michael Paliotta
• Nikita Soshnikov
• Dmytro Timashov
• Rinat Valiev/

Notable demotions include Miro Aaltonen, who has obviously lost the battle for the 4C job, and Kasperi Kapanen.

Players who are not waiver-exempt must be placed on waivers before they can be sent to the AHL.  Every team in the league will have the chance to claim these players.

The list of waived players today is:

• Colin Greening
• Vincent LoVerde
• Chris Mueller
• Kerby Rychel
• Ben Smith
• Garret Sparks/

As reported earlier today, Carl Grundström has been returned to Frölunda of the SHL.

Notable omissions include Eric Fehr and Josh Leivo who require waivers as well as Calle Rosen and Andreas Borgman who do not.  Obviously the final decisions haven’t been made quite yet.

The roster as it stands right now:

Do you think any of these waived players will get taken?