The William Nylander Alternate Captain Case Is Long Overdue

The William Nylander alternate captain question is still unanswered

The William Nylander alternate captain question is the cheapest problem the Maple Leafs could solve this month, and Jim Hiller should solve it before the first preseason game. Toronto has had a vacant letter since Mitch Marner was traded to Vegas. Craig Berube chose not to fill it, saying at the time that the leadership group was more than that. Berube is gone. The letter is still empty. The player who led the team in scoring is still not wearing one.

This is not a complaint about optics. It is an argument that the Maple Leafs have spent two years being coy about a role their best offensive player has already been performing, and that a new coaching staff building a new set of standards should stop being coy about it.

Where the letters currently sit

Auston Matthews is the captain, named in August 2024 when John Tavares handed the C over. Tavares and Morgan Rielly have worn the A's since. When Marner departed, the obvious move was to hand his letter to Nylander, and Berube declined, leaving Toronto with a captain and two alternates rather than the usual three.

There is nothing illegal about that — teams run two alternates all the time, and the NHL only requires that a club designate a captain and up to two alternates for each game. But the choice was noticed, because the player it passed over had at that point put together three consecutive 40-goal seasons. Our take on Matthews and the captaincy question covers the top of that structure; this is about the layer underneath it.

What Nylander actually did last season

In 2025-26 Nylander scored 30 goals and added 49 assists for 79 points in 65 games. He led the Maple Leafs in both points and assists. He did it at a 1.22 points-per-game rate, and he did it while missing 17 more games than John Tavares and still finishing ahead of him — and everyone else — in team scoring by eight points.

He also led the team in power-play points on a man-advantage unit that spent December ranked last in the NHL and cost an assistant coach his job. That is the part worth sitting with. Toronto's power play was a disaster and Nylander was still its most productive player.

This was a bad Maple Leafs season. The team missed the playoffs, fired its coach, fired its general manager, and won the draft lottery. Nylander's individual year was not the problem. It was one of the few things that worked.

The case against, and why it has thinned out

The historical argument against giving Nylander a letter is familiar: he plays a loose, improvisational game, he has never been the guy delivering the speech, and there were stretches under Berube where the two of them appeared to be asking for two different versions of hockey. Nylander himself described the relationship diplomatically — Berube was easy to talk to, they butted heads sometimes, that is the job — which is roughly what a player says when the fit was imperfect and he does not want a headline.

Fine. But look at who is left. Toronto's dressing room has been stripped down. Marner is in Vegas. The front office turned over almost entirely under John Chayka, with more than thirty departures across scouting, analytics and management. The coaching staff is new from Hiller down through associate coach Daniel Alfredsson. Tavares turns 36 this month and his role is being renegotiated by circumstance. Rielly spent the entire summer as a trade candidate and carries a no-movement clause that is the only reason he is still here.

In a room that has lost that much institutional memory, Nylander is one of three players left who has been through all of it. He arrived in 2016. He has been the subject of a holdout, a contract standoff, a trade rumour cycle every spring for five years, and he is still here producing at a point-per-game-plus clip. That is not nothing. That is the definition of a veteran.

Why Hiller specifically should make this call

Hiller has a genuine reason to act that Berube did not: he is starting from zero and gets to define the terms. He was an assistant in Toronto under Mike Babcock from 2015 to 2019, which means he was in the building for Nylander's first NHL seasons and knows the player as something other than a headline. There is no accumulated grievance to work around.

There is also a practical argument. Hiller's stated project — and Chayka's stated reason for hiring him — is installing standards and habits. Standards are enforced peer-to-peer more than they are enforced from the bench. If the coach wants his most talented forwards holding each other to a defensive structure, giving one of them formal standing to do it is the cheapest available lever. Our look at what Hiller has to install at his first camp gets at the tactical version of the same problem.

There is a roster argument too. Gavin McKenna arrives this month as the first overall pick with a three-year entry-level contract and expectations no 18-year-old should have to carry alone. Easton Cowan is a year into his NHL career. Matthew Knies is 23 and being asked to be a top-six power forward. Toronto is about to lean on young players in a way it has not in a decade, and the veteran most likely to be on their line — and most equipped to explain to a teenager why a bad night is survivable in this market — is Nylander. Formalizing that is not ceremony. It is job description.

And it costs nothing. No cap space, no roster spot, no trade. A letter.

The complication nobody wants to say out loud

The reason this has not happened is probably not that the organization doubts Nylander. It is that adding a third alternate in a room where Rielly might be traded and Tavares is in the last act of his career makes the leadership group look like a succession plan, and succession plans are awkward when the incumbents are in the room.

That awkwardness is worth eating. Rielly is a candidate to be moved this season or next; the Maple Leafs need at least one more player with standing before that happens. Tavares turns 37 in September 2027 and is approaching the end. Nylander is 30 and signed long term. He is going to be a senior figure on this team whether or not the sweater says so. Naming it now, in a rebuilding-adjacent year with a new coach and a first-overall pick arriving, is better than naming it in a crisis.

He is also approaching real franchise milestones — he is closing on 300 career goals, which we covered in our rundown of the milestones to watch in 2026-27. Players who spend a decade in one market and reach those numbers usually have a letter long before they get there.

What's next

Training camp opens in mid-September and the preseason begins September 19 with split-squad games against Montreal. Leadership announcements typically come near the end of camp, in the week before opening night on September 29 against the Canadiens.

If Hiller names a third alternate, Nylander is the only sensible choice; Matthew Knies is the long-term answer but is not there yet. If Hiller keeps two, the message is that Toronto's leadership structure is being held open pending trades — which is its own kind of information, and not a flattering one four weeks before the season. Watch the roster and lineup notes on our players page, and follow the season on our standings page.