Chris Tanev Still Isn't Cleared, but He Plans to Skate Day One

The Chris Tanev Maple Leafs health question is still open six days before training camp opens, because doctors have not signed off on him yet. Speaking at the NHL's player media tour this week, the veteran defenceman told TSN's Mark Masters that clearance is still pending but that his intent has not changed. "We still have to check some boxes with the doctors," Tanev said. "But the plan is for me to be out there day one of camp."

Camp opens Sept. 17. That is a tight window for a player six months removed from core muscle surgery, and the gap between "the plan" and "cleared" is the whole story here. Toronto's blue line is built on the assumption that a healthy Tanev exists. Nobody has seen one since October.

The good news, such as it is: Tanev is talking like a man who expects to pass. The bad news is that he said something almost identical in July, and the boxes are still unchecked.

What the Chris Tanev Maple Leafs injury year actually looked like

The 2025-26 season was a write-off, and it is worth spelling out how complete a write-off it was.

Tanev played 11 games. Eleven. He recorded two assists, finished plus-8 and averaged 17:58 of ice time in those appearances, which is a modest workload by his standards and reflects a player who was never fully right.

He missed 27 of 28 games between Oct. 24 and Dec. 21 with an upper-body injury, a stretch that included being taken off the ice on a stretcher against Philadelphia on Nov. 1. He then missed 23 more games with a groin problem. On March 4, the Leafs announced he had undergone surgery to repair a core muscle injury and would miss the remainder of the season.

Three separate injuries, one surgery, 11 games. For a team that finished with 299 goals against and missed the playoffs, losing its best defensive defenceman for essentially the entire year was not the only reason things collapsed — but it was a real one.

Why the clearance timeline matters more than it sounds

In a normal September, a veteran defenceman easing into camp would be a footnote. This is not a normal September.

The new collective bargaining agreement takes effect Sept. 16 and caps training camp at 13 days for any player credited with 50 or more games the previous season. It also cuts the preseason to four games per team and limits anyone with 100 or more career NHL games to two exhibition appearances. Jim Hiller is installing a new system on the shortest runway a new Toronto head coach has ever been handed, and we broke down exactly how compressed it is in our camp preview.

Tanev played 11 games last season, which means the 13-day cap may not bind him the way it binds Auston Matthews or Morgan Rielly. But the four-game preseason does. If he is cleared on Sept. 17, he might get two exhibition games to rebuild timing after 11 months of near-total inactivity. If clearance slips a week, he gets one, or none.

That is not enough runway for a 36-year-old shutdown defenceman coming off core muscle surgery, and it is why the phrase "managed carefully" is going to follow Tanev all season.

What the defence looks like with him, and without

Toronto's blue line has a shape only if Tanev is in it.

The club is carrying eight defencemen for seven jobs — a surplus we examined in the waiver crunch piece — and that surplus exists precisely because Chayka's staff cannot plan around Tanev's availability. Depth is not a luxury when your best penalty-killing defenceman has played 11 games in a year.

With Tanev healthy, the right side sorts itself. He takes the hardest matchup, Jake McCabe handles the second pair's defensive assignments, and Darren Raddysh gets to play to his strengths rather than being asked to defend above his level. We argued that case in our look at how the pairings should be built.

Without him, everyone slides up a rung. Raddysh becomes a top-four defensive option, which he is not. Oliver Ekman-Larsson absorbs minutes that expose him. Morgan Rielly's partner problem, which has been a recurring feature of the last five Toronto seasons, becomes a crisis again.

The honest version is this: Tanev is the second-most important player to the Leafs' defensive structure after Sergei Bobrovsky, and he is 36 years old with a body that has broken down three separate ways in 12 months.

The contract context

Tanev is entering the third year of the six-year, $27 million contract he signed on July 1, 2024, a $4.5 million cap hit that runs through 2029-30. He turns 37 in December.

That term was always the risk. Toronto paid for four or five good years from a player whose style — shot blocking, physical defending, arriving first on every puck battle — is the least sustainable style in hockey for a player in his mid-30s. Two years in, one of them is gone entirely.

It is part of a broader bet the club has made on its blue line, with roughly $25 million committed to four defencemen on significant term. We ran that math in our core-four defence breakdown, and the conclusion has not improved with time.

What Tanev said about everyone else

The clearance update was the news, but Tanev also delivered the most useful firsthand scouting available on two players Toronto's season depends on.

On Auston Matthews: "Auston's been back and looks amazing." Matthews himself told NHL.com's Nick Cotsonika at the same media tour that "my health is good," adding that he took real steps this offseason. After a 2025-26 in which Matthews was limited to 60 games and his lowest goals-per-game rate as a professional, that is the single most important sentence anybody in the organization has said this summer.

On Gavin McKenna: "Extremely smart, sees the ice very well and can make a ton of plays. I think he's going to do amazing, and he's got a great head on his shoulders." Tanev also said Easton Cowan has looked good in summer skates.

Take it for what it is — teammates in September are not neutral evaluators — but Tanev has been in the league 17 years and has no particular reason to oversell an 18-year-old he has skated with for a few weeks. McKenna makes his first appearance in a Leafs sweater this weekend at the Prospect Challenge in Gatineau, and we have the full roster and schedule here.

How this should be handled

Toronto should be slow, and the fan base should let them.

There is no version of this season in which Tanev playing on Sept. 29 against Montreal is worth more than Tanev playing in April. He does not need reps to remember how to defend; that part of his game is instinct built over 17 seasons. What he needs is a body that holds up across 84 games, which is four more than the league has ever asked of anybody.

The 84-game schedule is the quiet complication in all of this. Every veteran on this roster is being asked to absorb more hockey than in any prior season, and the Leafs' oldest core players are the ones with the least margin. If Tanev is not cleared by opening night, the correct response from Hiller's staff is a shrug and a start date in mid-October.

What's next

Camp opens Sept. 17. Medicals happen before anyone touches the ice, and that is where Tanev's status gets resolved one way or the other. If he is on the ice for day one as planned, he is a candidate for one of Toronto's four preseason games — split squads against Montreal on Sept. 19 and Ottawa on Sept. 23 — and he would be limited to two of them regardless under the new CBA.

If the boxes are still unchecked on Sept. 17, watch for the language. "Day to day" means he is close. Anything involving a re-evaluation date means Toronto is planning without him, and the eighth defenceman on the depth chart just became a roster player.

Track the blue line on our roster page and the money on the contracts page.