Steven Lorentz Waivers: Maple Leafs Put Eight on the Wire Before Deadline

Steven Lorentz waivers headline an eight-player purge in Toronto

The Steven Lorentz waivers decision landed Thursday afternoon, and it was not a standalone move. The Maple Leafs placed eight players on the wire in a single batch — Lorentz, Philippe Myers, Vinni Lettieri, Michael Pezzetta, Brendan Brisson, Marshall Rifai, Henrik Rybinski and Ryan Tverberg — as general manager John Chayka pushed the roster toward the NHL’s 5 p.m. ET deadline on Sept. 28 to submit a cap-compliant 23-man list.

Lorentz is the name that matters. He is signed through the 2027-28 season at a $1.35 million cap hit, he played a regular shift on Toronto’s fourth line for two seasons, and he is the sort of penalty-killing, forechecking depth forward that previous Leafs management paid a premium to keep. Putting him on waivers is a statement about what this front office thinks that archetype is worth.

The other seven are roster math. The eight of them together are the difference between a camp roster and an opening-night roster, and they are also the difference between a team that is over the salary cap and a team that can legally dress 20 players against Montreal on Sept. 29.

The cap math behind the move

Toronto entered the week roughly $2.8 million over the $104 million upper limit. Max Domi’s long-term injured reserve placement covers most of it, but not all of it — the club still needed to shed somewhere in the range of $1.6 million in real cap charge to get compliant with a full complement of players.

Sending Lorentz to the AHL’s Toronto Marlies clears roughly $1.15 million of his $1.35 million hit, because a portion of any buried contract still counts against the cap under the league’s minor-league burial rules. That single assignment does most of the work. Stack a couple of the other seven on top of it and Toronto submits a legal roster with a small amount of breathing room, which is more than it had on Monday.

The uncomfortable part is what the number implies. A team that needs to bury a $1.35 million fourth-liner to become compliant does not have a reserve. It has an exact fit. We walked through how tight the arithmetic is in our look at how Toronto gets cap compliant with Domi on LTIR, and the Lorentz move is the practical expression of that analysis.

Why Lorentz specifically, and why now

Chayka spent the summer rebuilding the bottom six from the outside. Nick Paul arrived from Tampa Bay on July 1 for goaltending prospect Dennis Hildeby, a 2027 fourth-round pick and a 2028 third. Colton Sissons, Teddy Blueger, Brandon Duhaime and Zack MacEwen came in as free-agent additions. That is five new bottom-six forwards competing for roughly six jobs.

Lorentz did not lose his spot because he got worse. He lost it because the organization went out and acquired four players who do a version of what he does, two of them with better faceoff numbers and one of them — Paul — with a track record of playing up the lineup when a team gets hurt. When you add that many similar players, somebody at the bottom of the stack gets squeezed out, and the squeezed player is usually the one whose contract can be moved to the minors without wrecking the cap sheet.

The risk Toronto is accepting

Any of the eight can be claimed. A claiming team takes on the full contract, which is a real deterrent for the ones with term, but $1.35 million for a fourth-line centre who kills penalties is not a punitive number for a club with cap space. Several teams around the league are still trying to reach the salary floor, and the wire is where they shop.

If Lorentz is claimed, Toronto gets the cap relief it wanted and loses the player entirely. If he clears, the Leafs keep a capable NHL forward on call in Etobicoke for $1.15 million in savings, which is the better outcome for a team that has already lost Domi indefinitely and is waiting on Nick Paul’s status for opening night.

This is the third straight day of Leafs waiver activity

Toronto is not moving in one burst. It placed players on the wire earlier in the week as part of a league-wide wave, and we covered that round in our piece on Dakota Mermis, Cole McWard and the 34-player waiver day. Thursday’s batch of eight was the largest single-day group Toronto has submitted this camp.

Across the league, 30 players were placed on waivers Thursday. That is typical for the final week: because the waiver process runs a full 24 hours, anyone who needs to clear before the Monday deadline has to be on the wire by the weekend. Nobody was claimed from Wednesday’s 15-player group, which suggests clubs are still being disciplined about taking on contracts before they submit their own rosters.

What it means for the fourth line

Strip out the waived players and Toronto’s forward group starts to resolve. Auston Matthews centres Matthew Knies and Jack Roslovic. John Tavares has Gavin McKenna and William Nylander. Paul and Sissons anchor the bottom half, with Easton Cowan expected to play meaningful minutes rather than sit.

That leaves the actual fourth line as the thinnest part of the roster, and it is thin by design. Toronto is carrying penalty-killing utility forwards rather than a traditional energy line, and the club is betting that an 84-game schedule is better survived with players who can be moved between the third and fourth lines than with specialists who only fit in one slot.

Whether that bet holds depends heavily on health. We laid out the final two undecided jobs in our breakdown of the sixth defenceman and the 13th forward, and Thursday’s waiver batch narrowed the field on both without settling either.

Our read: the right call, arriving about a year late

Waiving Lorentz is defensible on every axis. He is a fine fourth-line player. He is not better than the four forwards Chayka signed and traded for to do the same job. The contract runs two more seasons past this one, and carrying it on the NHL roster while paying five other bottom-six forwards would have been an indulgence Toronto cannot afford at $104 million.

The criticism is not of the decision. It is of the sequencing. Toronto signed and traded for five bottom-six forwards knowing it was already tight to the cap, which made an outcome like this inevitable in July. Moving Lorentz’s salary in a trade in August — even for a late pick — would have converted a player into an asset instead of exposing him to the wire for nothing. Instead the Leafs are now hoping a division rival does not simply take him.

That is the pattern worth watching with this front office. Chayka has shown he will make the correct roster decision. He has been slower to make it at the moment when it still has trade value, which is a different and more expensive habit. Our full accounting of the summer’s turnover is in the nine debuts Toronto could ice on opening night.

What happens next

The claim window on Thursday’s group closed Friday afternoon. Anyone who cleared reports to the Marlies, who open their own season Oct. 2 in Rochester. Anyone claimed is gone, with no compensation to Toronto beyond the cap relief.

From there the Leafs have the weekend to finalize the last lineup calls, submit the 23-man roster by 5 p.m. ET Monday, and host Montreal on Tuesday. The roster that plays that game will look very little like the one that finished last season, which was the point of the entire summer. You can track the contract picture on our contracts page and the division race on the standings page once games start counting.