The Leafs looking for a defenseman, a forward, or both, or neither. Welcome to silly season

It seems fitting that 2023 started off with the Leafs being the focal point of the 32 Thoughts intermission segment on New Year’s Day. 2023 needs to be the year for the Leafs and while it is not necessarily a now or never season for the Leafs, it’s definitely a “why not now?” season for the organization and might in fact be a now or never season for Kyle Dubas.
Kyle Dubas has spent the better part of the last three years reaffirming his belief in the post Mike Babcock Leafs, and while there has been plenty of tinkering along the way, the core of the Leafs is very much intact and for all will they/won’t they about the Leafs, Toronto might ultimately do very little. That of course won’t stop us or others from talking about what the Leafs could do leading up to the deadline nonstop for the next two months.
So that brings us back to Elliotte Friedman’s comments. (Clip can be found here.) Friedman noted that to start the season the conventional wisdom was that the Leafs would be shopping for a defenseman. The injury to Jake Muzzin certainly made that look like a strong possibility and still does. The Leafs haven’t replaced him or preferably replaced who Jake Muzzin was two years ago. Instead they’ve managed to get b …

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Author: Jon Steitzer / The Leafs Nation

It seems like the last thing standing between Kyle Dubas and vacation is the Rasmus Sandin contract. That’s not entirely true, but it could be what’s standing between Brandon Pridham and vacation. The Leafs very much established what they were looking for when Timothy Liljegren was signed to a 2-year $1.4M AAV deal, but it doesn’t seem to be what Rasmus Sandin has in mind. From the 32 Thoughts podcast, Elliotte Friedman suggested that Sandin would be looking for a deal similar to Adam Boqvist’s 3-year $2.6M AAV deal.
The truth could lie somewhere between the Liljegren deal and the Boqvist deal, or we could be looking at something completely different. Sandin is represented by Lewis Gross, who you will best remember from the William Nylander contract saga. So whatever it is Sandin wants, there is the potential that his agent will advise him to wait until December to get it.
Up until now, we’ve largely focused on what 2-3 year contracts would look like for Sandin, and when it comes to defensemen under the age of 24, the 2 or 3-year contracts are by far the most popular option. That shouldn’t exclude the possibility of a one-year, let’s come back to this next year when the Leafs have a money deal or the fact that Sandin could be looking for a locked-in long-term contract now. All three present different pro …

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Author: Jon Steitzer / The Leafs Nation

between last like seems standing thing