Maple Leafs Top Six Is Backwards: McKenna Belongs With Matthews

The Maple Leafs Top Six Is Built Backwards

The Maple Leafs top six that Jim Hiller has run through training camp puts Jack Roslovic on Auston Matthews' right wing and Gavin McKenna on the left side of John Tavares and William Nylander. It is a tidy arrangement, it has obvious logic behind it, and we think it is the wrong way around. The first overall pick belongs with Matthews and Matthew Knies. Roslovic belongs with Tavares and Nylander.

This is an opinion piece, and a week before opening night is the last moment it is worth arguing. Once lines survive a few games they acquire a kind of tenure.

What Hiller Has Actually Deployed

Since camp opened, the configuration has been Knies–Matthews–Roslovic on the first line and McKenna–Tavares–Nylander on the second. Hiller has said openly that the Knies–Matthews–Roslovic combination is the one he is most curious to assess this preseason, that he wants to watch them closely and go through video before forming a judgment. We covered the arrangement when it first appeared in the opening look at Toronto's camp lines.

The reasoning is not hard to follow. Matthews and Roslovic have history together. Knies has played on Matthews' wing for years. Tavares and Nylander have been a functioning pair for longer than that, and putting an 18-year-old with two established scorers looks like a soft landing. Every piece of that logic is defensible in isolation. Together they produce a top six that concentrates all of Toronto's play-driving in one line and all of its defensive exposure in the other.

The Case Against Roslovic on Matthews' Right

Roslovic is a useful NHL forward. He is also on his sixth organization before turning 30, which is the kind of career shape that tells you something. The recurring criticism of him in analytical circles is specific and, as far as we can tell, fair: he has never consistently won his five-on-five minutes. He scores in bursts, he has real hands, and the underlying results have followed him around the league without improving.

Put that player on the right wing of your best line and you get a predictable outcome. Matthews and Knies carry the shift. Roslovic finishes some of what they create and leaks some of what they prevent. That is a fine third-line role and an expensive first-line one, because the opportunity cost is the most valuable winger minutes on the roster.

We laid out the initial case when Roslovic first drew the assignment. Four preseason games later, nothing has arrived to change it.

The Second Line Has No Insulation

Now look at the other side. McKenna is 18 years old and listed at 164 pounds. He is being asked to play NHL left wing between — or rather alongside — a 36-year-old centre and a winger whose defensive reputation has never been the selling point.

Tavares remains a legitimate offensive player and a genuinely detailed one; Hiller has noted that McKenna is living with him and benefits from that proximity. But detail off the ice is not the same as foot speed in the neutral zone. Nylander is a supremely talented winger who has spent his career being deployed for offence, not against it.

So the line that has the least physical mass, the least defensive track record, and the least experience is also the line with the fewest safety valves. If a heavy forecheck arrives, nobody on that unit is built to answer it. That is not protecting a rookie. That is leaving him in traffic with two players who cannot clear the road.

The Development Argument Cuts the Other Way

The standard objection is that you do not put an 18-year-old with your franchise centre because the pressure is too much. We think that gets development backwards.

McKenna's problem in his first NHL season will not be scoring talent. He posted 15 goals and 36 assists for 51 points in 35 games at Penn State, setting the program's freshman records for assists and points. His problem will be surviving the parts of the game where an NHL opponent decides to lean on him: defensive-zone starts, board battles, tired changes against a matchup line.

The single best insulation available against all of that is Auston Matthews, who is one of the league's better two-way centres, and Matthew Knies, who is precisely the heavy, puck-retrieving winger a small rookie needs on the opposite side. That line can start McKenna in the offensive zone, win the draw, and let him play the game he is good at. We raised this argument when McKenna's linemates were still an open question. Camp has made us more confident in it, not less.

What the Swap Would Look Like

Move McKenna to Matthews' wing and slide Roslovic down to Tavares and Nylander and the Leafs get two lines that make sense rather than one that dominates and one that hopes.

The first line becomes Knies–Matthews–McKenna: a play-driving centre, a power winger who wins pucks back, and a distributor who turns recovered pucks into chances. Toronto's problem for years has been that its best line generated a lot and converted unevenly. McKenna's passing is a different input than anything Matthews has had on that wing.

The second line becomes Roslovic–Tavares–Nylander, and Roslovic's weaknesses matter far less there. He is not being asked to drive anything. He is being asked to skate, forecheck and shoot next to two players who will have the puck a lot. That is the role his career says he can hold.

It also simplifies the matchup problem. Hiller would have one line he can start anywhere and one he can shelter, rather than two lines that both want offensive-zone faceoffs for different reasons.

The Honest Counterargument

There are two real ones, and neither is trivial.

The first is Matthews' health. He is returning from knee surgery to repair a Grade 3 MCL tear, and he made his preseason return this month. A coach might reasonably want the most stable, most familiar personnel around his captain in October rather than an experiment. That is a defensible reason to wait — but it is a reason to wait, not a reason to build the season around Roslovic.

The second is that Hiller is new, the roster was rebuilt almost from scratch by John Chayka, and there is value in giving everyone a clean, conventional starting point before improvising. Toronto's split-squad preseason against Montreal was a sobering watch by most accounts, and a new staff might reasonably want fewer moving parts, not more.

Fine. Our position is simply that the experiment costs less in October than it will in January, and that the version of this roster with the highest ceiling has McKenna on the top line.

What's Next

Toronto's roster is due on Sept. 28 and the season opens at home against Montreal on Sept. 29. There is one preseason meeting with Ottawa left to move the needle, and Hiller has already said the first line is the thing he most wants to evaluate. He has given himself an exit.

Our guess is that the Leafs open with the current alignment and that it changes by American Thanksgiving, because that is usually how these things go. We would rather they skipped the six weeks. Track the lines and the standings as the season starts on our standings page, and the full roster picture on the players page.

Get this one right and the second line is a bonus. Get it wrong and Toronto spends two months discovering something it could have known in September.