Last offseason, the Toronto Maple Leafs signed unrestricted free agents (UFAs) Tyler Bertuzzi, Max Domi, Ryan Reaves, John Klingberg, Simone Benoit, Noah Gregor, and a couple of other minor pieces. Domi and Benoit have been solid additions by all accounts, as they have strong underlying statistics and have produced well in their roles. The others have been a bit disappointing, to say the least. Bertuzzi, though he’s come on as of late, had struggled to produce in a top-six capacity for the bulk of the season. Reaves and Gregor have been quasi-useless this season, with extremely weak metrics and point totals on the season, and Klingberg is out for the remainder of the season but was a defensive liability and offensive disappointment when in the lineup.
With that in mind, there are a few players the Maple Leafs could have signed to have helped in accruing better depth scoring instead of the players that they ended up offering contracts to. I did not include players who re-signed with the teams that they were with last season.
Evan Rodrigues
Perhaps the biggest steal of last off-season’s UFA class was forward Evan Rodrigues, who signed a four-year, $3 million AAV contract with the Florida Panthers. The versatile 30-year-old plays all three forward positions and can play anywhere in the top nine, as he has done with the Panthers, though he’s found the most success and played the most time on their top line alongside Aleksander Barkov and Sam Reinhart.
On the season, Rodrigues has scored eight goals and 33 total points in 58 games, six more points than the Maple Leafs’ choice of Bertuzzi and three more than Domi. He’s sporting an expected goals share (xGF%) of 58.41%, good for fourth on the Panthers and 18th best among all forwards in the NHL. For comparison’s sake, Bertuzzi leads Toronto in xGF% at 55.45%. Rodrigues has been excellent to say the least, and at a more-than-respectable $3 million cap hit, he’s one that the Maple Leafs let get away.
Daniel Sprong
Possibly my favorite bottom-six player in the entire NHL is none other than Daniel Sprong, who has been one of the league’s most efficient scorers for several years. He was signed by the Detroit Red Wings to a one-year, $2 million deal on the first day of free agency, and plays, unsurprisingly, on their fourth line. He shoots all the time, averaging just about three shots per game despite playing barely over 12 minutes on a nightly basis. The result? 16 goals and 38 total points.
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Among forwards with at least 500 minutes played, Sprong ranks 33rd in the league in goals/60 minutes. Narrowing that down even further to forwards with 500 minutes played who also play less than 11 minutes a night at 5v5, he’s fourth behind Nils Hoglander, Michael Carcone, and Alex Holtz. He’s one of the speediest players in the league and obviously has a great shot and underrated passing ability. Instead, Maple Leafs general manager Brad Treliving decided to pursue the likes of Reaves and Gregor in free agency — choosing grit and grind over a legitimate scoring threat in the bottom six — which makes it incredibly frustrating to think about how much more of a Stanley Cup threat they’d be if they hadn’t.
Shayne Gostisbehere
Of all the perplexing moves Treliving made in free agency, none was more confusing to me than signing Klingberg to that one-year, $4.15 million contract. Klingberg has knowingly operated as arguably the league’s worst defensive defenseman and has fallen off offensively over the years. One option they could have — and should have — pivoted to instead is Shayne Gostisbehere, who instead signed with the Red Wings for an extremely similar one-year, $4.125 million deal.
Gostisbehere has spent much of the season playing on the Red Wings’ bottom two pairs, which certainly makes sense considering he profiles as overwhelmingly offense-first. He’s tallied 29 assists this season, third-most on the team, and 38 total points, with 22 of them coming on the power play. His 5v5 xGF% of 46.46% is lackluster to be sure, but it’s surprisingly second highest on the Red Wings’ blue line. Gostisbehere and Klingberg are similar in style: they’re both third-pair, top-unit-powerplay-quarterback guys, but Gostisbehere is much, much better and comes in with a slightly cheaper contract than Klingberg. He’d have been quite the addition to the Maple Leafs’ defense corps, and I wonder how much more of a threat their second power-play unit would be with him quarterbacking it rather than defensive defenseman Jake McCabe.
Where Would the Maple Leafs Be With These Guys?
It’s obviously a somewhat moot point to project where the Maple Leafs would be standings-wise and how much more they’d be considered a Stanley Cup contender considering that, well, they didn’t sign these players. Still, it is an interesting thought experiment. Rodrigues over Bertuzzi, Sprong over Reaves, and Gostisbehere over Klingberg would have made the team a much deeper threat than they are and alleviated many of the depth-scoring issues that have plagued them this season. They’d certainly have more prerogative to commit to selling off all their assets in pursuit of a Cup, and would have fewer holes to fill in doing so.
