NHL Trade Deadline Primer: The Toronto Maple Leaf are sellers (or should be)

They need to sell, but not everything.

The NHL Trade Deadline (March 6) is approaching, and until it arrives we are going to take a look at some of the significant players and teams that could be making moves. We continue today with the Toronto Maple Leafs, a team that needs to recognize it screwed things up and needs to make some more changes.

When looking at the NHL’s most disappointing and underwhelming teams for the 2025-26 season, the Toronto Maple Leafs have to be near the top of the list.

While they have been a consistently maddening and frustrating franchise for their fanbase come playoff time, they have at least been a relatively successful team over the better part of the past decade when it comes to the regular season. You always knew they were going to win a lot of games, have a strong group of core talent at the top of the lineup, play a reasonably exciting brand of hockey and make the playoffs.

They have been worth watching for 82 games before always inventing new ways to lose in the playoffs.

There has also not been any one main reason they have consistently failed in the playoffs.

Luck is certainly a factor to some degree.

But producing just two playoff series wins in nine years goes well beyond just bad luck.

Sometimes they had depth and defensive issues. Sometimes it was goaltending issues. Sometimes they did not have enough scoring beyond their top four players. Sometimes it was all of these things all working together to limit their ceiling and success.

Over the past year-and-a-half it has simply been a case of bad management, bad asset management and just a bad overall plan to put together a mostly bad roster.

They traded multiple first-round picks and a really good young player in Fraser Minten at last year’s trade deadline for Brandon Carlo and Scott Laughton. It did not put them over the top in the playoffs, and it has not helped them become better this season.

The Carlo trade is especially looking like a giant miscalculation and poor evaluation.

In the offseason they made a major change to their core by parting ways with Mitch Marner, but instead of bringing in another superstar-level player to replace him, they brought in a bunch of depth pieces that were never going to make a big impact. It was a quality for quantity swap, left a major hole at the top of their lineup and they did not adequately fill it.

All of it has left them in a position going into the Olympic break where they are out of the playoff race, facing a pretty daunting climb to get back into it, while also having one of the league’s worst farm system’s and almost no significant draft picks to use as trade capital.

They are in the bottom half of the league standings, have awful underlying numbers and even worse, they are simply boring.

Bad and boring is no way to go through an NHL season. Or any season in any sport.

Because of that the Maple Leafs need to make the difficult — and unexpected — decision to become sellers when the NHL’s trade freeze is lifted after the Olympics.

It does not need to be a total teardown. It also probably should not be. But there is no way they should be adding to this roster, or even standing pat and doing nothing. The main goal over the next few weeks should be adding future assets — including potential future trade assets — back into the organization.

Let’s talk about it.