Maple Leafs Winger Rankings: Nylander 10th, Marner 4th, Knies Nowhere

One Maple Leafs winger made the list, and it was not the one Toronto needed

The NHL Network Maple Leafs winger rankings for 2026-27 landed this week, and the Toronto entry is short. William Nylander at No. 10. That is the whole list. Matthew Knies, coming off a career-high 66 points, did not make the top 20 at all — and at No. 4, four spots ahead of Nylander, sits Mitch Marner in a Vegas Golden Knights sweater.

Every part of that sentence stings for a different reason, which is what makes this list worth sitting with rather than dismissing. Rankings are marketing. But the shape of this one describes Toronto's actual problem better than most of the analysis published this summer.

The full top 20, and where Toronto fits

NHL Network's order: Nikita Kucherov, David Pastrnak, Kirill Kaprizov, Mitch Marner, Mikko Rantanen, Matt Boldy, Jason Robertson, Matthew Tkachuk, Cole Caufield, William Nylander, Kyle Connor, Artemi Panarin, Brandon Hagel, Sam Reinhart, Martin Necas, Jake Guentzel, Clayton Keller, Brady Tkachuk, Cutter Gauthier, Lucas Raymond.

Twenty names. One Maple Leaf. For a franchise that spent most of the last decade with two or three wingers in every list of this kind, that is a structural change, not a slight.

The Boldy leap — up 13 spots to sixth — is the panel's boldest call, and it landed him ahead of Robertson, Matthew Tkachuk, Caufield and Nylander. Reasonable people can argue about that. Nobody in Toronto should waste much energy on it.

Nylander at 10 is roughly right, and that is the problem

Nylander scored 30 goals and added 49 assists for 79 points in 65 games last season. He led Toronto in goals, assists and points, put up a team-high 22 power-play points, and produced at 1.22 points per game — the best full-season rate of his career, on a team that finished last in the Atlantic Division with 78 points.

Tenth is a fair reading of that. It is also the ceiling of what a ranking panel will give a winger who plays 65 games. Two seasons ago Nylander scored 45 goals in a full 82, the first 45-goal season by a Maple Leaf since Mats Sundin. Health, not talent, is what separates him from the group ranked above him — the same argument we made when running the math on a 50-goal season.

Here is our read: Nylander is a top-five winger in the league on a per-minute basis and a No. 10 winger on a counting-stat basis, and until he plays 78-plus games, the panels will keep grading the second version.

The Marner problem is not going away

Marner ranked fourth. He left Toronto in a sign-and-trade with Vegas, and the return has not aged into anything that looks like fair value. Every one of these lists is going to reopen that file for the next five years.

The honest accounting is more complicated than the raw ranking suggests. Marner's departure created the cap room that funded a good chunk of what John Chayka did this summer, and Toronto's problem in the playoffs was never that Marner was insufficiently productive in the regular season. But you do not replace a top-five winger by committee, and the 2025-26 collapse — a franchise-record 30-point drop — is what happens when you try.

That is context, not excuse-making. It is also the clearest single explanation for why Toronto has one winger on a list of 20.

Matthew Knies was left off, and the case against him is not crazy

Knies had 23 goals and 66 points in 79 games — a career high in points and a six-goal drop from the 29 he scored the season before. He added 152 hits and 16 power-play points. He is 23 years old and signed at $7.75 million through 2030-31.

Left off a list of 20 wingers. The instinct in Toronto is outrage. Slow down.

The wingers ranked 15 through 20 — Necas, Guentzel, Keller, Brady Tkachuk, Gauthier, Raymond — all cleared 66 points or carry a scoring profile the panel trusts more. Knies scored fewer goals on a worse team while playing through injury at points in the season, and his skating visibly flagged in stretches. A panel weighing "who would you take right now" can reasonably leave him out.

What it cannot do is leave him out next year if he does what Toronto is paying him to do. We have argued that 30 goals is the load-bearing number for Knies and for the Maple Leafs, and this snub is the external version of the same point. He is being paid like a top-20 winger and graded like a good complementary one. Only one of those can stay true.

What the Maple Leafs winger rankings say about Chayka's roster

Strip out the tribal reaction and the rankings describe a forward group with exactly two players the rest of the league considers elite, one of whom is a centre coming off knee surgery and the other a winger who has not played a full season in two years.

That is not a contender's profile. It is the profile of a team that needs internal growth from Knies, a real rookie year from Gavin McKenna, and a step from Easton Cowan to have any margin at all. Chayka spent the summer building depth — Nick Paul, Colton Sissons, Jack Roslovic, Teddy Blueger — and depth is genuinely valuable. It does not produce top-20 wingers.

Pair this with NHL Network placing Auston Matthews eighth among centres and the picture is consistent: the league sees a deeper, more sensible, less dangerous Maple Leafs team. Our breakdown of the projected 2026-27 lineup shows how the pieces are meant to fit.

The right side is still the hole nobody filled

There is a structural reason Toronto has one winger on this list, and it is not just Marner's absence. The Maple Leafs are short of right-shot wingers, and have been for two years.

Nylander plays the right side. After that, the depth chart runs through converted lefties and bottom-six bodies. Jack Roslovic can play the right wing and has scored 20-plus in a season, but nobody is confusing that with a top-six solution. Chayka added size and responsibility to the bottom of the lineup and did not add a scoring winger who shoots right.

That matters for the rankings and it matters far more for the power play. It also matters for Matthews, whose 27-goal season came in part from a shortage of finishing talent on his flank. We have written about Toronto's right-shot winger problem and the summer did not resolve it — Chayka simply decided the in-season trade market was a better place to solve it than July 1.

He may be right. He is also asking Hiller to open the year with Nylander as the only winger the opposition genuinely fears.

The one ranking that could flip fast

McKenna is the variable nobody on the panel could price. The No. 1 overall pick signed his three-year entry-level deal and is expected to compete for a roster spot at camp after a 51-point freshman season at Penn State that included program freshman records for assists and points.

Eighteen-year-olds do not appear on top-20 winger lists. They do appear on them at 20, and the fastest route to Toronto having three names in this conversation is McKenna arriving early rather than the veterans aging backwards. That is also the least reliable thing to plan around.

What's next

Camp settles some of this. Preseason opens September 19 with split-squad games against Montreal, and the regular season begins September 29 across an 84-game schedule. Watch for how Jim Hiller pairs his wingers: whether Knies stays glued to Matthews, whether Nylander gets the McKenna experiment, and whether the power play that produced Nylander's 22 power-play points changes shape with Darren Raddysh quarterbacking from the point.

Rankings in August are a snapshot of what the league believes. The Maple Leafs get 84 chances to argue. Follow the depth chart on our players page and track the standings race on the standings page.