Maple Leafs Defence Waiver Crunch: Eight Blueliners, Seven Spots

The Maple Leafs defence waiver crunch is the roster problem nobody planned for

The Maple Leafs defence waiver crunch is the least glamorous item on Toronto's pre-camp to-do list and one of the few with a hard deadline attached. John Chayka has eight NHL defencemen under contract for 2026-27. A standard lineup dresses six, and a standard 23-man roster carries seven. At least one of those eight is going to end up somewhere other than the Maple Leafs' opening-night roster, and because of how NHL waivers work, Toronto may not get to choose where.

This is what happens when a general manager runs an aggressive summer. Chayka acquired Emil Andrae in the Joseph Woll trade with Philadelphia, re-signed Troy Stecher, kept Philippe Myers, and never found a taker for Morgan Rielly. Every individual move was reasonable. The sum is a blue line with one more body than it has room for and a cap sheet with no slack to absorb the mistake.

The eight, and how Toronto got here

The group, as constructed: Jake McCabe, Morgan Rielly, Chris Tanev, Darren Raddysh, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Troy Stecher, Philippe Myers and Emil Andrae.

The top six picks itself. McCabe and Raddysh, Rielly and Tanev, Ekman-Larsson and Stecher is the alignment most projections land on, and it is a defensible NHL blue line if everyone is healthy. That leaves Myers and Andrae competing for one seventh-defenceman job — a job that mostly involves not playing.

The complication is that Toronto expected to have moved a defenceman by now. Rielly was the summer's most persistent trade candidate and stayed put. He carries a $7.5-million cap hit and a full no-movement clause that runs through July 2027, and he submitted a four-team trade list, which shrinks the market to almost nothing. As we wrote when the Myers depth question first surfaced in August, the eighth defenceman was always going to be a problem if the trade above him never happened.

How NHL waivers actually work here

The mechanics matter, so here they are plainly.

A player who is no longer waiver-exempt cannot be assigned to the American Hockey League without first being placed on waivers, where all 31 other clubs get a shot at claiming him. Exemption is a function of age at signing and games played as a professional; young players are protected for a set window and then they are not. Once a defenceman loses that protection, sending him to the Marlies is a live risk, not a paper transaction.

Philippe Myers is not exempt. Toronto cannot quietly stash him with the Marlies — he would have to clear waivers first, and a 6-foot-5 right-shot defenceman on a cheap contract who is a pending unrestricted free agent is exactly the profile a cap-strapped team claims for free.

Myers is the obvious answer and that is the problem

Every version of this analysis lands on the same place: Myers is the cheapest of the depth options, has the shortest contractual runway as a UFA after this season, and is therefore the easiest to lose. That logic is sound right up until you consider what Toronto would be exposing.

Myers is a big right shot, and Toronto's blue line is short on both. If Chris Tanev misses time — he had core-muscle surgery in March after last playing in December, and has missed significant stretches in each of the last two seasons — the seventh defenceman is not a theoretical roster piece. He is the second-pairing partner. Losing Myers on waivers in late September to save a roster spot, then watching Tanev tweak something in October, is the kind of sequence that costs a coach ten games of decent hockey.

The Andrae variable

Emil Andrae is the other half of the equation and the part that is genuinely unsettled. He arrived from Philadelphia in the Woll deal and has since been signed to a two-year extension. He is 24, undersized, mobile, and the closest thing Toronto has to a puck-moving defenceman in the pipeline who is ready now — we covered what Toronto actually got back in that trade in detail.

What is not clear from the outside is whether Andrae remains waiver-exempt for 2026-27. That single fact changes the entire calculus. If he is exempt, Toronto keeps eight defencemen in the organization, plays seven, and rotates Andrae to the Marlies for minutes without risk — a clean answer. If he is not, the Maple Leafs are choosing which of two useful young-ish defencemen to hand to a rival for nothing. That is a question worth putting directly to Chayka on the first day of camp, and one nobody outside Ford Performance Centre should be asserting an answer to.

Carrying eight means losing a forward instead

There is a version where Toronto simply keeps both, dresses six defencemen, and carries two healthy scratches on the blue line every night. It solves the waiver problem by creating a different one.

A 23-man roster with nine defencemen leaves 14 forwards and two goaltenders — and Toronto's forward group is already crowded. Chayka signed Colton Sissons, Teddy Blueger, Brandon Duhaime, Jack Roslovic and Zack MacEwen, traded for Nick Paul, and drafted Gavin McKenna first overall. Easton Cowan is coming off a rookie season of 11 goals and 29 points in 66 games and is expected to be a full-time NHL player. Somebody in that group is then the one going on waivers instead, and MacEwen at $875,000 or a similar depth forward is no more expendable in practice than Myers is.

Every path out of this ends with Toronto exposing a real NHL player. Our breakdown of which roster spots are actually open at camp walks through the forward side of the same squeeze.

The trade that solves it

The clean solution is the one Chayka has been chasing since July: move salary out in a hockey trade rather than a compliance dump. Toronto is projected around $105.85 million against a $104-million upper limit, which means the cap problem and the roster problem have the same answer if one deal can address both.

The names most often attached to that exit are Dakota Joshua at $3.25 million and Oliver Ekman-Larsson at $3.5 million. We have argued that moving Ekman-Larsson would be the wrong call — he led Toronto's defencemen in scoring last season and is the roster's best insurance against exactly the injuries this blue line is prone to. A forward moving out is the better trade, and it does not fix the eighth-defenceman question at all.

Which is the honest summary: there is no single move that resolves both. Chayka likely needs two, and he has about four weeks. Our running accounting of the compliance math is in our piece on getting cap compliant by opening night.

What's next

Training camp opens in mid-September, the preseason begins September 19 with split-squad games against Montreal, and Toronto opens the regular season at home to the Canadiens on September 29. Waiver claims cluster in the final days before opening night, when every team is making the same cuts at once and the claiming order runs by inverse standings — which, after Toronto missed the playoffs last season, is not a list the Maple Leafs sit high on.

Watch the first week of camp for two tells: whether Andrae is getting third-pair reps with the NHL group or being run with the Marlies contingent, and whether Myers is dressing in preseason games. Teams do not usually give meaningful exhibition minutes to a player they intend to waive. Track the cap sheet on our contracts page and the full roster on our players page.