Maple Leafs Core Four on Defence: $25 Million and a Lot of Term

Toronto now has $25 million tied up in four defencemen

The Maple Leafs core four on defence is a real thing now, and it costs more than the forward group people keep arguing about. Morgan Rielly at $7.5 million, Darren Raddysh at $8.5 million, Jake McCabe at $4.513 million and Chris Tanev at $4.5 million combine for just over $25 million against the cap — roughly a quarter of Toronto's payroll committed to four blueliners, three of whom are on the wrong side of 30.

That is a philosophical statement, not an accident. John Chayka did not sign those four contracts, but he signed the largest of them and he chose not to unwind any of the others. This is the shape of the team he wants.

Whether it works is the single biggest open question of the 2026-27 season, and it is a different question than the one Toronto has spent a decade asking.

Why the Maple Leafs core four on defence looks nothing like the old one

The original Core Four — Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, John Tavares — was four players doing the same job with different accents. Score. Drive play. Produce.

The blue-line version is the opposite. Raddysh is the puck-mover and power-play quarterback. Rielly is the transition engine who is being asked to do less of everything else. McCabe is the matchup defender who takes the other team's best line. Tanev is the shot-blocking, penalty-killing insurance policy, when healthy.

Four distinct jobs, four different risk profiles. That is a more defensible way to spend $25 million than four versions of the same skill, and it is the clearest evidence yet of what Chayka actually believes about roster construction.

The Raddysh contract is the whole bet

Raddysh arrived in a sign-and-trade with Tampa Bay and immediately became the most expensive defenceman on the team: eight years, $68 million, an $8.5-million cap hit, and a full no-movement clause across the entire term. In years seven and eight the no-movement softens into a 16-team no-trade list. Until then, he is untradeable without his permission and cannot be sent down.

Eight years for a defenceman who was a UFA at 30 is aggressive by any standard. The bet is that Raddysh's shot volume from the point is a genuine power-play solution — we have made that case ourselves — and that the back half of the term is the price of getting the front half.

The risk is obvious and it is not a secret. A no-movement clause on an eight-year deal removes every escape hatch. If Raddysh is a $8.5-million second-pair defenceman in 2030, that is Toronto's problem for four more years, and the cap rise only partially bails it out. Our full breakdown of the contract walks through the term structure.

Rielly at $7.5 million is the awkward number

Rielly is 32, carries a $7.5-million cap hit with four years remaining, and spent the entire summer in trade speculation before telling NHL.com he expects to stay. Chayka, by all accounts, told him directly the club is not moving him.

On production, Rielly is fine. He is not the problem some of the discourse suggests. On fit, he is genuinely awkward: a left-shot transition defenceman on a blue line that now has three of them, and a power-play specialist on a team that just paid $8.5 million for a different power-play specialist.

The version where this works has Rielly playing 19 minutes a night with real offensive-zone starts, running the second unit, and being freed from the defensive assignments that have exposed him for years. The version where it does not has Toronto paying two players for the same job and asking Jim Hiller to sort it out with ice time.

McCabe and Tanev are the cheap part, and the fragile part

McCabe at $4.513 million and Tanev at $4.5 million are, by 2026 standards, bargains — and both run through 2029-30, which is the part that will matter in three years.

We have argued McCabe is the most important defenceman on the roster, and nothing about the summer changed that. He is the only one of the four who reliably eats hard minutes against the opposition's top line without needing to be sheltered.

Tanev is the fragile one. He turns 37 in December, missed time last season, and his game — blocking shots, killing penalties, absorbing punishment — is precisely the game that ages worst. He is also irreplaceable if he holds up. A healthy Tanev changes the entire structure of Toronto's penalty kill.

What the depth looks like behind them

Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Troy Stecher and Emil Andrae fill out the group at a fraction of the cost. Andrae, acquired from Philadelphia, is 24 and the only genuine youth on the blue line. He is also fighting a lineup logjam created by exactly the contracts described above.

That is the second-order cost of a $25-million core four. It is not just the money. It is that every dollar of it comes with a job attached, and there are only six jobs. Andrae, and Ben Danford behind him, are competing for minutes that are largely spoken for through 2029-30.

Toronto has more defencemen under NHL contract than it has spots. That is a good problem in October and an expensive one in March. You can track the full commitment picture on our contracts page.

Is $25 million too much?

Not on its own. Elite blue lines cost money, and the alternative — spending the same $25 million on three forwards and a bargain-bin defence — is how Toronto got outmuscled in the playoffs for most of a decade.

The concern is not the total. It is the term and the age curve running against each other. Rielly, McCabe and Tanev are all signed through 2029-30. By the final year of those deals Rielly and McCabe will be in their mid-30s and Tanev will be 40. Raddysh runs four years past that. Toronto has locked in its blue line through a window in which every one of them will be worse than they are today.

The counterweight is a rising cap. Every one of these numbers shrinks as a percentage of the ceiling. That is the argument Chayka would make, and it is not a bad one — it is the same argument that makes Matthew Knies' deal look better each year.

What's next

Camp opens in September and the first real question is pairings. Hiller has to decide whether Raddysh plays with McCabe on a first pair built to both defend and produce, or whether Rielly and Raddysh get separated by design to spread the puck-moving across two units.

Watch the power-play alignment closely in preseason. If Raddysh runs the first unit and Rielly runs the second, the roles are settled and the $16 million in left-side and right-side puck-movers is being used efficiently. If both are on the first unit, Hiller is hedging, and somebody's usage is about to become a story.

Toronto opens the preseason September 19 against Montreal and the regular season September 29. The blue line is the most changed part of this roster and the most expensive. It is also the part with the least margin for a bad October. Follow the group on our players page.