The Maple Leafs Defence, Not the Goaltending, Is What Ends This Season in April

The Maple Leafs defence is the problem nobody fixed this summer

Every projection that buries the Maple Leafs this season points at the crease. Sergei Bobrovsky is 38. Anthony Stolarz is coming off a bad year. The models rank Toronto near the bottom of the league in expected goals saved above average and the conclusion writes itself.

It is the wrong diagnosis. The Maple Leafs defence is what ended last season and it is what will end this one, and the reason is simpler and more damning than any goaltending projection: Toronto allowed 299 goals in 2025-26 and did not meaningfully change the group responsible for that.

John Chayka spent his summer on forwards and a goaltender. He added Darren Raddysh and Emil Andrae to the blue line and let the rest stand. Two of the six defencemen who will dress Tuesday night are playing a slot above where they belong, and one of them is 36 years old.

Everyone on this blue line is one chair too high

Go through it honestly.

• Darren Raddysh is now Toronto's de facto No. 1 right-shot defenceman. He is a genuinely good puck-mover who was a very effective second-pair player in Tampa. He is not a No. 1.
• Jake McCabe is an excellent second-pair defensive defenceman playing top-four minutes against the other team's best line.
• Chris Tanev is 36, recovering from a series of injuries, and his game has always depended on a body that has now blocked shots for 15 seasons.
• Oliver Ekman-Larsson was asked to do far too much last season and is, at this stage of his career, a strong bottom-pair option.
• Morgan Rielly is a player the organization would move if a serious offer existed. It did not.
• Nick Blankenburg arrived on a professional tryout and won a job, which tells you what the competition looked like.

There is no individual disaster here. That is what makes it dangerous. A blue line with one catastrophic weakness can be sheltered. A blue line where all six players are 15 per cent above their natural level cannot, because there is nowhere to hide anyone.

84 games makes it worse, not better

The new CBA moved the season to 84 games and cut the pre-season from six games to four. For a deep team, two extra games is noise. For this defence corps, it is two more games of Tanev at 36 and two more games of Ekman-Larsson taking minutes he should not take.

Twenty-eight of those games come against divisional opponents — four each against Florida, Tampa Bay, Boston, Montreal, Ottawa, Buffalo and Detroit. Florida has won two of the last three Stanley Cups and plays a forecheck specifically designed to punish defencemen who need an extra half-second on retrievals. Toronto sees them four times.

Under the old rotating schedule, a team could catch a soft draw. That escape hatch is gone. Toronto's defence will face the Atlantic's best forecheck teams a fixed 28 times, and there is no version of the schedule that spares them.

Goaltending is downstream of this

Here is the argument for why the projections have the causality backwards. Toronto allowed the most shots against per game in the league last season and among the most goals. Those two facts are related, and the second one is mostly caused by the first.

A goaltender's public numbers are heavily shaped by the volume and quality of what reaches him. Stolarz's 2025-26 was worse than his career norms, and part of that is Stolarz. A larger part of it is that he was facing more than 32 shots a night behind a defence corps that could not exit its own zone cleanly.

Put Bobrovsky behind the same structure and you get the same result, elite technique or not. The Florida teams Bobrovsky won two Cups with gave up fewer shots and fewer high-danger chances than almost anyone in the league. That was not incidental to his numbers; it was most of them. The projections ranking Toronto's crease 30th are, in a real sense, ranking Toronto's blue line.

What Hiller can actually do about it

Not enough, but something. The two things a coach controls that most affect a weak defence corps are zone-exit structure and how much the forwards help below the goal line.

Hiller spent camp emphasizing defensive-zone retrievals and forecheck structure, which is the correct read of the problem. The specific fix is having the centre and weak-side winger collapse lower on retrievals so the defencemen are not making a first pass under pressure with no outlet. It costs offence. Toronto scored 253 goals last season and cannot afford to lose many more.

That is the actual trade-off in front of Hiller, and it is why the pairing experiments in camp mattered more than the usual September tinkering. He is not choosing between good and better. He is choosing which weakness to expose.

The fix costs assets Chayka has not been willing to spend

Toronto needs a genuine top-pair defenceman. That player costs a first-round pick and a top prospect at minimum, and Chayka has spent his first five months signalling he will not pay that price. He shut down the Matthew Knies trade talk he inherited. He did not move Easton Cowan. He got nothing serious for Rielly and kept him rather than selling low.

That is defensible asset management for a team that is not a contender. It is also an admission that this season's blue line is what it is. You cannot simultaneously refuse to trade young players and expect the defence to improve, and the front office deserves credit for at least being consistent about which of those two it prefers.

The cap makes it moot anyway. Toronto is compliant only through Max Domi's long-term injured reserve placement, with a projected pool measured in hundreds of thousands rather than millions. There is no room to add a $6 million defenceman in October regardless of the asset cost. The contract situation is here, and it does not improve until the summer.

The counter-argument, taken seriously

The strongest case against this position goes like this: last season's 299 goals against came under a different coach, with Auston Matthews injured for large stretches, and with a forward group that had just lost Mitch Marner and had no idea how to defend without him. Change the coach, add four capable defensive forwards, get the captain back, and the defensive numbers improve without a single change to the blue line.

That argument has real force. Nick Paul, Colton Sissons, Teddy Blueger and Brandon Duhaime are all legitimate defensive forwards, and Toronto's bottom six was genuinely bad last season in a way it should not be this year. Defensive results are a five-man exercise, and four of those five positions got better.

Where it breaks down is on the retrieval problem specifically. Better defensive forwards help most in coverage and in the neutral zone. They help least on the first pass out of the defensive zone under forecheck pressure, which is exactly where Toronto's defencemen struggle and exactly what Florida and Tampa Bay are built to attack. You cannot forward your way out of a blue line that cannot exit.

What's next, and what would change our mind

Watch shots against per game for the first 20 games. If Toronto is still allowing north of 31 a night, the structure did not take and the season is over by American Thanksgiving regardless of who is in net.

If that number drops toward 29 — still bad, but survivable — then Hiller's system is working and the goaltending projections are going to look foolish by January. That is the single cleanest early-season indicator on this team, and it is more predictive than the win-loss record in October.

Toronto opens the 100th season Tuesday against Montreal at Scotiabank Arena, 7 p.m. ET. Our position: this defence corps allows too much, the goaltending takes the blame, and the club finishes short of the playoffs for a second straight year. We would love to be wrong, and the tell will show up in the shot counts long before it shows up in the standings.