Atlantic Division Injuries Open the Season, and That Is Toronto's Opening

Atlantic Division injuries have piled up, and Toronto is not the worst off

The Atlantic Division injuries list heading into opening week is long enough that it changes how the first month of the 84-game season should be read. Detroit is without its captain-in-name-or-not. Buffalo has two defencemen down. Florida is starting without one of its most recognizable forwards. Tampa Bay has lost a centre until December. Ottawa is nursing two regulars back.

Toronto has its own list — Max Domi out indefinitely, Nick Paul day-to-day and uncertain for Tuesday, Dakota Joshua just back from a core-muscle issue — and it is not a short one. But relative to a division that was supposed to bury the Maple Leafs this season, the opening-week ledger is closer to even than anyone in Toronto would have guessed in July.

That matters because of how the schedule front-loads. October is where a team that missed the playoffs last season either buys itself margin or spends the rest of the year chasing. Playing division rivals while they are short is the single cheapest source of points available.

Detroit: Larkin out, and the front office is still interim

Dylan Larkin suffered an upper-body injury while training before camp opened and has not played in the pre-season. Forward Carter Bear is dealing with an upper-body issue of his own, described as day-to-day or roughly a week. Chase Stillman arrived at camp with an off-season injury and has not been cleared.

The Red Wings are also operating with Shawn Horcoff as interim general manager, a situation we covered when Horcoff took over in Detroit. A club without its best centre and without a permanent GM is not a club that makes aggressive in-season corrections in October.

Toronto and Detroit have a long history of the Leafs treating the Red Wings as a schedule gift and then losing 4-2. Larkin’s absence is real, though. He drives that team’s matchup line, and there is no internal replacement for what he does at both ends.

Buffalo: two defencemen down before a game counts

Mattias Samuelsson is week-to-week with a lower-body injury after blocking a shot in a pre-season game. Olen Zellweger is in concussion protocol following an injury in the same stretch of exhibition play. Losing two blueliners in September is the kind of thing that gets absorbed by a deep team and compounds on a shallow one.

Buffalo spent the summer trying to change its trajectory, including the eight-year extension for Noah Ostlund that we broke down in our look at what Ostlund’s deal signals about the Sabres’ plan. The plan does not survive contact with an October in which the defence corps is improvising.

Florida: still the best team in the division, still banged up

Brad Marchand is expected to miss the start of the season following surgery. The Panthers have also spent recent seasons managing injuries to Aleksander Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk, Carter Verhaeghe, Sam Bennett and Seth Jones, which is less a run of bad luck than the predictable cost of the way that team plays.

None of it has stopped them. Florida added Brady Tkachuk this summer, a move we treated as the most consequential development in the division in our piece on what Tkachuk’s arrival in Florida means. A Panthers team missing Marchand for a few weeks is still the deepest roster Toronto will see all season.

The honest framing

Florida being short-handed in October is worth something to Toronto, but it is worth less than it looks. The Panthers have built the one roster in the division that can lose a top-nine forward and not notice in the standings until March.

Ottawa and Tampa Bay: quieter problems, real ones

Ottawa opened camp without Artem Zub, who is still working back from a lower-body injury suffered in April, and without Warren Foegele. Kurtis MacDermid is also recovering. Neither Zub nor Foegele appears to be a long-term concern, but both were in question for the start of the season.

The larger Ottawa story is the one we wrote in August: the Senators are entering this season without Brady Tkachuk, which is a bigger subtraction than any injury on this page. They also put goaltender Leevi Meriläinen on waivers Thursday as part of the league-wide roster crunch.

Tampa Bay is without Yanni Gourde until roughly December following off-season hip surgery, and forward Dominic James will miss the first two weeks after breaking his hand training. The Lightning have been the most durable organization in this division for a decade, so a centre missing two months is genuinely outside their normal.

Montreal has a different problem, and it is due Monday

Toronto’s opening-night opponent is not dealing with a significant injury list. The Canadiens are dealing with a surplus. Montreal does not plan to carry three goaltenders into the regular season, which means either Samuel Montembeault gets traded or Jacob Fowler is assigned to Laval before the Sept. 28 deadline.

That is a decision with consequences for the whole division. A Montembeault trade puts a proven NHL starter on the market in the first week of the season, and several clubs — including some in this division — would be interested. We looked at the Toronto angle in our piece on the Canadiens’ goalie surplus.

For Tuesday specifically, none of it matters. Montreal will dress a healthy lineup built around Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Ivan Demidov and Lane Hutson, and Toronto will find out immediately whether its rebuilt bottom six can handle a fast, young opponent. Our scouting report is in the opening-night Canadiens preview.

Our read: this is the window, and it is narrow

Toronto’s realistic path back to the playoffs runs through an October in which it takes points from teams that are not whole. Detroit without Larkin, Buffalo with a patched blue line, Tampa Bay without Gourde — those are games where a club with a top line of Matthew Knies, Auston Matthews and Jack Roslovic should be favoured, and where a team fighting for a wild-card spot in March will wish it had been.

The caveat is that the Leafs are not exactly healthy themselves, and the difference between a division rival’s injury and your own is that you can only control the second one. If Nick Paul misses two weeks and Toronto plays four division games in that stretch with a thrown-together bottom six, the theoretical advantage evaporates.

Our position is that the injury picture argues for aggression rather than caution in the first three weeks. This is not a roster with enough talent to bank points later. It is a roster that has to take them when the schedule and the opposition’s medical room hand them over. Track how that goes on our standings page.

What happens next

All 32 clubs submit cap-compliant 23-man rosters by 5 p.m. ET Monday, Sept. 28. Injury designations get formalized at that point, which is when the day-to-day cases across the division either dress or land on injured reserve.

The season opens Tuesday, Sept. 29 with Toronto hosting Montreal. Within two weeks the division will have sorted itself into teams that got healthy and teams that did not, and the Maple Leafs need to be collecting points before that happens. Full roster detail is on our players page.