Maple Leafs Training Camp Roster: 73 Players, 25 Defencemen, 13 Days

Toronto opens camp with 73 names and almost no runway

The Maple Leafs training camp roster is 73 players deep — 41 forwards, 25 defencemen and seven goaltenders — released Wednesday ahead of the club's first on-ice session on Thursday. It is a big number for a camp that the new collective bargaining agreement has squeezed down to 13 days and four preseason games, and that mismatch between bodies and available ice is the defining tension of John Chayka's first September running the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Auston Matthews, John Tavares, William Nylander and first overall pick Gavin McKenna headline the forward group. Darren Raddysh, acquired from Tampa Bay in a June sign-and-trade, anchors a rebuilt defence corps. Sergei Bobrovsky, signed to a three-year, $21 million deal on July 1, is the most decorated name among the goaltenders. Jim Hiller, hired in June to replace Craig Berube, gets his first look at all of it at once.

The headline names were never in doubt. The interesting part of a 73-man list is always the other 60 — who got an invite, who did not, and what the positional split says about where the organization thinks its problems are.

How to read the Maple Leafs training camp roster

A camp list is a budget document disguised as a hockey document. Every invitation costs ice time, and ice time is the scarcest resource in the building this month. When a club hands out 73 of them, it is telling you it has more open questions than a settled team should.

Sort the list into three buckets and it becomes readable. Roughly 22 of these players are opening-night locks, give or take an injury. Another dozen are legitimately competing for the last four or five jobs. The remaining 40 are there for developmental exposure, organizational depth, or because somebody in amateur scouting wanted the staff to lay eyes on them in a professional environment. Only the middle group is worth your attention.

The split-squad structure of the preseason schedule exists for exactly this reason. Four games across two nights, two rosters per night, gives Hiller's staff eight lineup sheets to work with instead of four. That is the only way a 73-man camp survives a 13-day calendar without half the invitees never dressing for a game.

Twenty-five defencemen is not a rounding error

A quarter of the camp roster plays defence. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the clearest tell in the entire document. Toronto carried a blue-line surplus into September — we wrote about the waiver crunch that surplus created — and then watched injuries eat into it before a single practice.

William Villeneuve underwent ACL reconstruction in the off-season and is out long-term. Cade Webber had elbow reconstruction and is month-to-month. Morgan Rielly reported with a viral condition and will be ramped up more slowly than planned. Chris Tanev, whose summer was a running medical story, has been cleared. That is four separate blue-line files before the first whistle, and it explains why the organization wanted depth on hand rather than scattered across junior and the AHL.

The projected top four — Rielly, Raddysh, Jake McCabe and Tanev — is expensive and, in three of four cases, past 30. We laid out the pairing math earlier this month. What camp decides is the bottom two spots and the seventh-defenceman job, and those are now being contested by a group that is one Rielly setback away from mattering a great deal.

The crease is the least competitive battle on the roster

Seven goaltenders are on the Maple Leafs training camp roster: Bobrovsky, Anthony Stolarz, Artur Akhtyamov, Ken Appleby, Samuel Hlavaj and Timofei Obvintsev among them. Only two of those names are going to matter on September 29.

Bobrovsky and Stolarz were teammates in Florida during the Panthers' 2023-24 run, with Stolarz backing up the two-time Vezina winner. Chayka reunited them on purpose. The tandem structure is the single biggest change to how this team will look compared with last season, and it is the one position where Toronto does not need camp to tell it anything.

The rest of the goaltending list is development and emergency cover. Akhtyamov is the organization's most interesting internal option. Appleby is the veteran insurance policy every camp needs so that nobody's starter takes 60 shots on a Tuesday. None of them are auditioning for an NHL job in September.

Forty-one forwards, and maybe three real openings

Strip out the locks and the forward competition gets small fast. Matthews and Tavares are the top two centres. Nylander and Matthew Knies occupy two top-six wing spots. Nick Paul, acquired from Tampa Bay on July 1, Colton Sissons, Teddy Blueger, Brandon Duhaime and Jack Roslovic were all signed or traded for to fill specific slots, and teams do not hand out those contracts in July to lose the jobs in September.

That leaves the genuinely open questions: where McKenna starts, whether Easton Cowan takes a full-time NHL role after a strong Marlies playoff run, and who wins the last fourth-line spot. Hiller has said McKenna will show the staff where he fits rather than being handed a line, which is both a reasonable coaching position and a convenient way to avoid promising an 18-year-old a spot beside the captain.

Cowan is the more interesting case, because his path runs through players already under contract. We looked at what a second season should look like for him earlier this month. A 13-day camp does not give a 21-year-old much room to change a depth chart.

The cap is the quiet third party in every decision

Toronto is not operating with flexibility. Against a $104 million ceiling, public cap trackers have the Leafs projected slightly over — in the neighbourhood of $106.7 million — with roughly 50 players under contract. The escape hatch is Max Domi, who failed his physical after back surgery in late May and is out indefinitely, making long-term injured reserve the mechanism that gets Toronto compliant on opening night.

That has two consequences for camp. First, a player who plays his way onto the roster has to displace salary, not just a body. Second, the 50-contract limit means every professional tryout or late signing costs something real. We covered the subtraction problem in detail. The full picture lives on our contracts page.

The practical version: Hiller can evaluate 73 players, but Chayka can only act on a handful of the conclusions.

Thirteen days, four games, 84 on the other side

The new CBA, which took effect September 16, cut camp from 21 days to 13 for experienced players — 18 for first-year players — to make room for an 84-game regular season. That is the structural story of this September across the league, not just in Toronto. The Lightning and Bruins opened under the same compressed calendar this week.

Toronto's four exhibition games come in two split-squad doubleheaders: Montreal on Saturday, September 19, and Ottawa on Wednesday, September 23. Split-squads double the evaluation sample, which is exactly why a team with 73 invitees wanted them. Then it is straight to the opener against the Canadiens on September 29.

For a new head coach installing a new system, that runway is brutally short. We argued in August that Hiller's installation problem was the most underrated storyline of the Leafs' off-season, and nothing about a 73-man roster on a 13-day clock changes that view.

What's next

Expect the first meaningful cuts inside a week. Junior-eligible players go back first, then the AHL contracts that were never realistically competing, and the list compresses toward an opening-night group of 22 or 23. Watch the defence cuts most closely: with Villeneuve out and Rielly limited, Toronto has more incentive than usual to keep an extra body around into the final days.

The fastest way to read this camp is to ignore the 73 and watch the four or five decisions that are actually live — McKenna's deployment, Cowan's role, the third pairing, and whether Rielly is at full speed by the 29th. Track the roster as it shakes out on our players page, and the Atlantic race it feeds into on our standings page.