Predicting Toronto's final 4 roster cuts.

A look at who may not make the final cuts.

HockeyFeed
HockeyFeed
Published 5 years ago
Predicting Toronto's final 4 roster cuts.
Keystone Press

The Toronto Maple Leafs made some significant cuts to their roster this week but somewhat surprisingly the organization has left quite a few decisions for fairly late into the process. 

Currently the Maple Leafs are sitting on a 26 man roster there are a number of likely candidates who will make up the group of final cuts prior to the start of the 2018 - 2019 National Hockey League regular season. Although the Leafs only need to cut 3 players to get down to the 23 man roster limit as things currently stand, the William Nylander situation adds an extra wrinkle to this situation.

For the sake of simplicity I am going to assume here that Nylander will be signed by the time the regular season starts and if that is indeed the case that would push the Leafs up to a 27 man roster. It's entirely possible that Nylander ends up traded if the two sides can't reach a deal but since we can't know what such a trade would look like it's too difficult to predict how the Leafs would move forward in that scenario.

So with Nylander signed the Leafs would need to cut 4 players from their roster, and when you consider that 3 players have been mentioned in trade talks over the last week or so that's where we will start. Late last week the Fourth Period's David Pagnotta reported that the Leafs were actively shopping 3 of their players, forward Josh Leivo, defenseman Connor Carrick and goaltender Garret Sparks. The report came after Toronto's final game of the 2018 NHL preseason and it seems fair to suggest that this was an attempt by the Leafs to get some kind of return for these guys prior to putting them on the waiver wire. Should the Maple Leafs attempt to send these men down to the American Hockey League they would have to clear the waiver process and that means they would risk losing them to any team in the league with absolutely no return to show for it. 

I think both Leivo and Carrick are locks when it comes to players who will be cut but I'm not so confident about the Sparks prediction. I have been hearing through the grapevine that the Leafs still haven't decided when it comes to Sparks and veteran goalie Curtis McElhinney. At 35 years old though you can argue that McElhinney has less upside than Sparks, even though he may be the superior short term solution, and that may be why Sparks and not McElhinney was the goaltender put  on the trading block. I would not be at all surprised if the Leafs chose to move forward with Sparks and it was McElhinney instead who found his way to waivers, and I think that no matter which goalie goes there's a chance that one team will look to claim some additional depth between the pipes on waivers.

Yesterday reports began to suggest that Martin Marincin would be one of the odd men out of the line up when the final cuts are made and given both his age and the current group of defensemen the Leafs have under contract I do think that he is very likely going to be the 4th man cut from the roster by the Leafs. One more name who could replace one of the aforementioned players however is Frederick Gauthier. Gauthier's ability to flex to both center and the wing make him a valuable Swiss army knife in head coach Mike Babcock's toolkit but that will be less valuable once William Nylander signs his new deal with the Leafs.

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