Toronto Maple Leafs: The NHL’s Worst Off-Season Moves

The Toronto Maple Leafs had a pretty quiet summer.

Nick Ritchie, Michael Bunting and David Kampf may turn out to be significant players for the Toronto Maple Leafs this season, but they were not the kind of fun, exciting additions that this team has made in the past few off-seasons.

In the three previous summers, the Leafs brought in Tavares, Kerfoot and Barrie, and T.J Brodie.  Those were big, exciting moves.

This summer, the biggest move the Leafs made was making a trade to avoid losing a player off their roster in the expansion draft.  It’s not exciting, but since they (correctly) resisted emotion-based (and nonsensical) please to blow up their core, there wasn’t really that much to do.

Other NHL teams didn’t have that issue, so in the spirit of fun, let’s look at the NHL’s worst offseason moves.

Toronto Maple Leafs Play It Cool, While Other G.Ms Go Crazy

I don’t know what was going on with NHL G.Ms this summer, but not much of it was good. From the immature and frankly idiotic Jesperi Kotkaniemi offer-sheet, to the Canadiens paying a first and a second round pick for a guy who scores at roughly the same rate as Pierre Engvall, a lot of NHL moves this summer were just straight-up stupid.

One team that was especially terrible were the Edmonton Oilers.  They started off the summer decently with a solid extension to Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.  Unfortunately, after that they started a tire fire in their own front office, the fumes of which will likely choke the life of of Connor McDavid’s prime.

The Tyson Barrie contract is dumb. The Cody Ceci contract makes the Tyson Barrie contract look like a stroke of genius. The Darnell Nurse contract made them both look good.  Nurse’s eight-year $9.25 contract extension is perhaps the worst contract ever handed out in the NHL.  Nurse, who rode a high shooting percentage to a 16 goal in 56 game season that he will never reproduce, is getting paid like he’s a #1 defenseman on any team in hockey.

Just for the record, if he played for the Toronto Maple Leafs he’d be their fourth best defenseman, pending the further development of Travis Dermott and Rasmus Sandin.  This contract makes David Clarkson’s old deal look good.

More Terrible Offseason Moves

The Oilers lost Ethan Bear and Adam Larson, and replaced them with Duncan Keith and Cody Ceci.  It’s unfathomable how stupid this franchise is.   We haven’t even gotten to the Zach Hyman deal yet, and they’ve already had maybe the worst summer in NHL history.   Did I mention they re-signed MIKE SMITH to a two-year deal?

Other terrible NHL moves included the Canucks trade for Oliver Ekman-Larsson, the Flyers trading a former 2nd overall player for a 30 year old injury plagued defenseman on a bad contract, the Flyers trading a 1st round pick for Rasmus Ristolainen and subsequently paying Arizona to take Shayne “Way Better Than Ristolainen” Gostiesbehere.

There were so many bad moves it’s hard to keep track of them.  You can’t blame Tampa for their moves, they had to do them, but it was a rough offseason for them. Edmonton, Philly, Vancouver, Seattle, Carolina, Montreal, Chicago, Colorado, The Islanders, and the Rangers, all had really, really bad summers, mostly due to self-inflicted stupidity.

Buffalo, Arizona, New Jersey and your Toronto Maple Leafs are about the only teams that didn’t have a disastrous  summer.

But I have saved the worst move  for last.  The NHL’s worst move of the summer has to come from Chicago where the Hawks inexplicably sent former 8th overall potential future star Adam Boqvist, along with the 12 overall pick in this past draft, and their 1st round pick for next year in exchange for Seth Jones and a 1st (which was the 32nd pick, so it’s only a technically a first and would have been the first pick of the second round if not for expansion).

To compound the stupidity of trading for the NHL’s most overrated player, the Hawks signed him to a $9.5 million dollar extension that doesn’t even start until 2022-23. 

It’s hard to know which was worse, the trade or the signing.  Either one alone might have been the worst move of the NHL’s offseason.