Bo Groulx Has Outplayed the Maple Leafs' Depth Chart. Play Him on Tuesday

Bo Groulx has quietly won a Maple Leafs roster spot

Bo Groulx is the most useful player on the Maple Leafs that nobody is arguing about, and with two forwards banged up 48 hours before the opener, he should be in the lineup on Tuesday rather than watching it. Groulx moved into the 13th-forward role during camp, and on Sunday at Mullett Arena he skated as an extra and rotated onto the top line with Matthew Knies, Auston Matthews and Jack Roslovic. Coaches do not put an extra forward with Matthews unless they trust him.

He costs $812,500 against the cap. He won a Calder Cup five months ago. He is a centre who can play the wing. For a team that opened camp $2.75 million over the $104-million limit and gets compliant by roughly $70,000, that combination is close to the ideal shape of a roster player — and Toronto has spent most of September treating him as an afterthought.

The Calder Cup run was not incidental

The Toronto Marlies won the 2026 Calder Cup in June, the second championship in franchise history after 2018, beating the Chicago Wolves 4-3 in Game 5 at a sold-out Coca-Cola Coliseum. Artur Akhtyamov took the Jack A. Butterfield Trophy as playoff MVP. Easton Cowan put up three points in the clincher. Groulx tied that game on the power play in the second period.

That is the detail worth holding onto. In the biggest game the organization played last season, with the title on the line, Groulx was on the ice in a scoring situation and delivered. He also had a five-point cameo — three goals and two assists — in his first stint with the Leafs last season, which is a small sample but not a bad one.

The Marlies' championship group is quietly running through this camp. The Marlies are reloading around a new cast, and several of the players who won that Cup — Cowan, Akhtyamov, Groulx — are now competing for or occupying NHL roles. Winning at the AHL level is not a guarantee of anything. It is evidence, and the Leafs should weigh it as such.

What $812,500 buys a team with no cap room

Groulx signed a two-year deal worth $1.625 million in total — $812,500 per season — in free agency in the summer of 2025. It expires after this season, at which point he becomes an unrestricted free agent. In a market where competent fourth-line forwards routinely cost $1.5 million or more, that is a bargain, and the bargain matters more to Toronto than to almost any other club.

Walk through the math on our roster deadline breakdown and the constraint is obvious: after Max Domi's $3.75-million cap hit goes to long-term injured reserve, the Leafs clear the upper limit by a margin you could cover with a mid-range NHL signing bonus. Every dollar of a marginal roster spot matters at that altitude. The contracts page shows how little room there is anywhere else.

A team in that position should be maximizing its cheapest competent players, not warehousing them. Groulx at $812,500 doing a job that Toronto would otherwise pay $1.5 million for is not a nice-to-have. It is structurally necessary.

The injuries turn this from depth to lineup

Nick Paul is day-to-day with an undisclosed injury after leaving the September 23 preseason game against Ottawa in the second period. He practised in Arizona on Sunday, but Jim Hiller has not committed him to the opening-night lineup. Dakota Joshua, working back from a core issue, was a full participant on the weekend and looked a step slow in spots, and Hiller has been explicit that Joshua will not be rushed.

If either one sits Tuesday, the 13th forward becomes the 12th, and the question stops being theoretical. We tracked both injuries through the week and neither resolved cleanly. The most likely version of Tuesday night is one of them out, one of them in, and Groulx drawing in on the fourth line.

Which is the point of this piece: Toronto should not treat that as a fallback. Zack MacEwen has genuinely earned consideration — Hiller praised the way he inserted himself physically when the game got chippy, not just the goal he scored — and the competition is real. But MacEwen's case is about what he brings in specific situations. Groulx's case is that he can play centre, play wing, kill a penalty and play a power-play shift, which is exactly what a 13th forward has to be.

The versatility argument nobody is making

Toronto's bottom six as constructed is a collection of specialists. Colton Sissons and Teddy Blueger are defensive centres. Brandon Duhaime is an energy winger. Joshua is a heavy forechecker when healthy. Paul is the most complete of the group and he is hurt. There is not a lot of positional slack in that list.

Groulx is the slack. A player who can slot in at either centre position in the bottom six or on a wing is worth more to a coach than a marginally better specialist, because it means one injury does not force three changes. Look at how our projected lineup holds together and the fragility is in the middle — remove Paul and Hiller is shuffling wingers into centre spots.

There is a penalty-killing dimension too. Toronto's short-handed group leaned heavily on a small number of forwards last season, and a fourth-liner who can take a defensive-zone draw and kill a minute is worth more than his ice time suggests. Groulx has done that work at both levels.

The counterargument, fairly stated

Groulx is 26 and has not yet held down a full NHL season. He has bounced through Anaheim and New York before landing in Toronto. The five points in his Leafs cameo came in limited minutes against tired opponents in a lost season. He is not a hidden star and this is not an argument that he is.

There is also a legitimate case that Toronto is better served keeping him Marlies-eligible and recallable, since a $812,500 contract buried in the AHL costs almost nothing and gives the club a free call-up all season. That flexibility has value, especially for a team with LTIR complications to manage.

Our answer: that is the argument for keeping him around, not for keeping him out. He is already going to be in the organization. The choice is whether the cheapest versatile forward on the roster spends October playing or waiting, and a club with a 37 per cent playoff probability should be playing its useful players.

What's next

Rosters go to the league by 5 p.m. ET Monday. Watch whether Toronto places Paul or Joshua on injured reserve — if either move happens, Groulx is almost certainly dressing Tuesday against Montreal. If both are healthy enough to play, he goes to the press box and the 13th-forward competition continues into October.

Either way, the Leafs have a Calder Cup-winning, positionally flexible forward on a contract that expires in nine months and costs less than a million dollars. That player should be closer to the centre of the plan than the edge of it. Toronto has spent two summers looking for cheap answers to hard roster questions. This one has been sitting in its own dressing room since June.