Brendan Brisson Signs With Maple Leafs on a One-Year, Two-Way Deal

Brendan Brisson joins the Maple Leafs on a one-year contract

The Maple Leafs signed forward Brendan Brisson to a one-year contract on Friday, adding a former first-round pick to the organization less than two weeks before training camp. Brendan Brisson is 24, he was the 29th overall selection by Vegas in the 2020 draft, and he arrives on a two-way deal that pays $850,000 at the NHL level and $300,000 in the American Hockey League. It is the cheapest kind of swing a general manager can take, and John Chayka took it.

Brisson spent last season in the New York organization, splitting the year between the Rangers and the Hartford Wolf Pack. He recorded an assist in three NHL games and 37 points — 19 goals, 18 assists — in 66 AHL games. Across 27 career NHL appearances with Vegas and New York he has two goals and seven assists. That is the honest résumé: a productive minor-leaguer who has not yet stuck.

What Toronto is actually buying

Nineteen goals in 66 AHL games is a real number. It is not star production at that level, but it is the output of a player who can finish against professionals, and Toronto's system has a documented shortage of exactly that. Our look at the goal-scoring gap in the Leafs prospect pool made the point plainly: Toronto has developed a lot of useful two-way forwards and very few players who put the puck in the net. Brisson is a shooter by trade.

He is also a right-shot forward who can play centre or the wing, which is the kind of positional flexibility that determines who gets recalled first in December. The Marlies are coming off a Calder Cup championship and will lose bodies to the NHL club. Brisson slots into that lineup as a top-six AHL forward with an NHL contract, which is a materially better depth situation than Toronto had a week ago.

What Toronto is not buying is a guaranteed roster player. Brisson will have to earn his way into the NHL lineup at a camp where the available roster spots are genuinely limited. The forward group's top six is effectively set with Auston Matthews, William Nylander, John Tavares and Matthew Knies, plus the competition among Gavin McKenna, Easton Cowan and Jack Roslovic for the remaining looks. Brisson is behind all of them on the depth chart on Sept. 5.

The pedigree question

Brisson's draft position still shapes how people talk about him. Taken 29th overall out of the USHL's Chicago Steel, he went on to captain Michigan and put up strong college numbers before turning pro. The tools were never the issue: he shoots it well, he thinks the game at pace, and he has a legitimate NHL release.

The issue has been everything around the shot. He has not been physically dominant at the NHL level, and his defensive game has not been reliable enough for a coach to trust in a fourth-line role while he waits for offensive chances. That is a common trap for skilled forwards who are not quite skilled enough to be deployed as pure scorers — there is no obvious job for them on a good team.

Toronto's pitch, presumably, is that Jim Hiller's staff and a rebuilt development structure can find the job. It is worth remembering the Leafs have already had success this decade turning cast-off scorers into useful NHL pieces. Sometimes it takes.

The complication: Toronto is now at 50 contracts

The Brisson signing has a consequence beyond the player. Per PuckPedia, Toronto is now at the NHL's 50-contract limit, the maximum number of standard player contracts a club can carry. That matters more than it sounds. We flagged in August that the Leafs were sitting at 49 of 50 with the new CBA's ban on paper transactions closing the usual escape hatch. That last slot is now spent.

Sending a player to the Marlies does not open a slot — a standard contract stays on the books after a demotion. To add anyone else, Chayka has to subtract someone: a trade, a buyout window that has closed, or a mutual termination. In practical terms, the Leafs' offseason shopping is over unless they make a hockey trade.

That also functionally ends the professional tryout conversation that has followed Toronto all summer, with names like Jonathan Drouin and Reilly Smith floated as camp invitees. A PTO does not count against the 50, but a PTO that succeeds needs a contract slot to convert into, and Toronto no longer has one sitting free. We argued in August that Toronto's silence on PTOs was about protecting that final slot. The club has now chosen how to spend it.

Was Brisson the right use of the last slot?

This is where reasonable people disagree, and where LeafsLurker will take a side: yes, marginally, but it is not the swing we would have taken.

The case for Brisson is that he is young, cheap, buriable in the AHL at $300,000, and carries genuine upside if a shooter's role opens up. He costs nothing if he fails. That is a defensible use of a slot for a team that needs to keep finding cheap forwards while Matthews, Nylander and Knies eat the cap.

The case against is opportunity cost. Toronto's actual roster weakness is not AHL scoring depth — it is the possibility that Chris Tanev is not right and the right side of the defence thins out. Spending the final contract on a 24-year-old winger with nine career NHL points, rather than holding it for a defenceman who becomes available at the end of camp when other teams make cuts, is a bet on a specific kind of need. If Toronto ends up scrambling for a right-shot defenceman in October, that slot will look expensive.

What this says about Chayka's method

Chayka's first summer in Toronto has been consistent in one respect: volume of cheap, specific bets rather than one large one. He traded Joseph Woll and Simon Benoit to Philadelphia, brought in Nick Paul, and signed Colton Sissons, Teddy Blueger, Jack Roslovic, Brandon Duhaime and Zack MacEwen. He then spent big in exactly one place, the crease, landing Sergei Bobrovsky.

Brisson fits that pattern precisely. It is a lottery ticket bought with money that would otherwise sit idle. Chayka's analytics background has always favoured accumulating cheap options over paying a premium for certainty, and this is the purest expression of it yet in Toronto. Whether that approach produces a playoff team is the season's central question, one we have wrestled with in our 2026-27 projection.

What's next

Brisson will be in camp on Sept. 17 and should get preseason looks starting with the split-squad games against Montreal on Sept. 19, where a team carrying this many bodies has to spread ice time widely. His realistic path is a strong camp, an AHL assignment, and a call-up in the first month when injuries hit — which, based on last season, will not take long.

The more interesting thread is what Chayka does next. At 50 contracts with a camp full of players who need waiver decisions, Toronto is one signing away from having to make a trade it does not particularly want to make. Watch the last week of September closely. The defence waiver crunch and the contract ceiling are now the same problem.