Toronto Marlies 2026-27: Champions Open Oct. 2 With a Roster Still Forming

The Toronto Marlies 2026-27 season opens Oct. 2 with a roster still being assembled

The Toronto Marlies 2026-27 season begins Friday, Oct. 2 on the road against the Rochester Americans, with the home opener the following afternoon at Coca-Cola Coliseum against the Hamilton Hammers. It is the club’s 22nd season and the first as defending Calder Cup champions since the roster that won it was taken apart.

The unusual part is that nobody involved can yet tell you who is on the team. Toronto placed eight players on waivers Thursday, and every one of them reports to the Marlies if they clear: Steven Lorentz, Philippe Myers, Vinni Lettieri, Michael Pezzetta, Brendan Brisson, Marshall Rifai, Henrik Rybinski and Ryan Tverberg. That is most of an AHL forward group and two defencemen, arriving in a single afternoon, five days before puck drop.

It is also a reminder of what the Marlies are for. The 72-game schedule runs to Sunday, April 11, ending at home against the Laval Rocket. In between, this roster is the Maple Leafs’ injury insurance for an 84-game NHL season with no mid-season international break.

What Toronto won last spring, and what it lost

The Marlies won the 2026 Calder Cup by beating the Chicago Wolves 4-1 in the final, the second championship in franchise history and the first since 2018. Goaltender Artur Akhtyamov won the Jack A. Butterfield Trophy as playoff MVP, which is the single most transferable credential a prospect can pick up in the American League.

The cost of winning is that everyone notices. Easton Cowan came out of that run as an NHL regular rather than a prospect, and he is expected to play meaningful minutes for the Maple Leafs this season rather than return to the Coliseum. Veterans who anchored the championship group have moved on. A defending champion that loses its best young forward and a chunk of its veteran core does not repeat, and the organization has said, in effect, that it is fine with that.

We made the case for why in our piece on why the Marlies should be a development year. Winning the American League is pleasant. Producing NHL players is the job, and the two goals are not always compatible.

Steve Sullivan’s first season behind the bench

Sullivan was named head coach on July 9. He spent 2025-26 as an assistant with the Maple Leafs and the two seasons before that with the Marlies, which makes him a rare hire in this organization: someone who knows both buildings and both rosters without needing an orientation period.

Mark Giordano was elevated to assistant coach and joins Denver Manderson and Greg Moore on the bench, with Hannu Toivonen handling goaltending and Nick Biamonte on video. Chris Bourque was named assistant general manager. We broke down what that group signals about the organization’s development strategy in our look at the completed Marlies staff.

Sullivan inherits a specific and awkward assignment: run a competitive professional hockey team whose best players will be removed from it without notice, and whose worst outcomes — a veteran on a one-way contract taking minutes from a 21-year-old — are the ones that look most respectable in the standings.

The waiver arrivals complicate that

This is where the eight-player batch matters. Lorentz is an NHL fourth-line centre who was squeezed out by cap math rather than by performance. Myers has NHL experience on the blue line. Pezzetta, Lettieri and MacEwen-type forwards exist to make an AHL room functional and an NHL call-up plausible.

None of them is a development priority. All of them will be better than the prospects they are competing with for minutes on Oct. 2. A coach whose mandate is development and whose roster is suddenly stacked with NHL-adjacent veterans has to make choices in October that will look wrong in a box score and right in April.

Prospects to actually watch

Ben Danford is the name to start with. The former first-round pick scored his first professional goal in Game 1 of the Calder Cup Final and finished the run with three points in 16 games, which is modest production and beside the point — he was trusted in the highest-leverage games of a championship series as a rookie professional. We looked at his NHL path in Danford’s push for a right-shot role.

In goal, Akhtyamov carries the Butterfield Trophy and the awkward reality that Toronto’s NHL crease belongs to Sergei Bobrovsky and Anthony Stolarz for the foreseeable future. That is a good problem for the organization and a frustrating one for the goaltender, and we traced the whole depth chart in Akhtyamov’s path through the pipeline.

The broader forward group is thinner than last season by design. Cowan is gone to the NHL. Gavin McKenna was never coming here. What remains is a mix of mid-round picks and college signings who need volume minutes, which the departures have now created.

Why the Marlies matter more this year than last

Toronto’s NHL roster has no cap room and an injury list that already includes Max Domi indefinitely, Nick Paul day-to-day, William Villeneuve recovering from ACL reconstruction and Cade Webber from elbow reconstruction. The Maple Leafs will be making call-ups in October, not February.

When that happens, the question is not whether the Marlies have a body available. It is whether the body they send is an NHL player. A team that spent September collecting eight waiver-wire veterans has protected itself on that front, which is defensible for this season and slightly at odds with the development mandate.

The honest reading is that Chayka has built the affiliate to do two jobs at once and will find out over 72 games whether that is possible. Our view is that it usually is not, and that the tiebreaker should always go to the 21-year-old. Follow the NHL side’s contract picture on our contracts page and the prospect pool on the players page.

The schedule, briefly

Toronto opens Friday, Oct. 2 at 7:05 p.m. ET in Rochester and holds its home opener Saturday, Oct. 3 at 4 p.m. ET against Hamilton at Coca-Cola Coliseum. The 72-game regular season closes Sunday, April 11 at home against Laval.

The Marlies start three days after the Maple Leafs, which means the first weekend of October is the first real test of whether the organization’s depth chart survives contact with reality. If Toronto is already calling players up by then, the development year gets harder before it gets started.

What happens next

The eight waived players either clear and report to the Coliseum or are claimed and gone. The Maple Leafs submit their 23-man roster by 5 p.m. ET Monday, Sept. 28, which is also the moment the Marlies roster stops being hypothetical.

For the championship that set all of this up, see our coverage of the Marlies winning the 2026 Calder Cup, and for the NHL roster decisions driving the AHL group, our breakdown of the eight-player waiver batch.