Zack MacEwen Is the Maple Leafs Signing Nobody Talks About

Zack MacEwen signed with the Maple Leafs on July 1 for two years at $875,000 a season, and almost nobody noticed. That is understandable — it was the same day Toronto committed $21 million to Sergei Bobrovsky and rebuilt half its forward group. But the MacEwen signing is worth a second look heading into training camp, because it is a bet on a player coming off ACL surgery joining a roster that already has more checking forwards than it has jobs. Somebody is getting squeezed, and the math says it is probably him.

Who Zack MacEwen actually is

MacEwen has played 240 NHL games across Vancouver, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Ottawa and New Jersey, producing 17 goals, 34 points and 323 penalty minutes. That ratio tells you the job description without needing a scouting report. He is a large, physical winger who fights, forechecks, gets to the front of the net and does not score. Every team has one. Most teams are quietly glad they do.

Last season went badly before it started. New Jersey acquired him from Ottawa in October 2025 in exchange for Kurtis MacDermid — one enforcer for another, a trade that made almost no ripple at the time. He appeared in three games for the Devils, registering six hits and four shots. He was injured on Nov. 12, underwent ACL surgery in January, and was shut down for the year by then-Devils head coach Sheldon Keefe, whose Toronto history gives the whole sequence a small extra layer of irony.

So Toronto signed a player who is a year removed from meaningful hockey, coming off a reconstructed knee, whose value has always been physical. That is the risk. The price — $1.75 million across two seasons — is the mitigation.

Why John Chayka signed him at all

The obvious reading is that Chayka wanted insurance and a specific kind of presence. Toronto's forward group was rebuilt in July around structure and defensive reliability: Colton Sissons at a $4.25 million cap hit, Teddy Blueger at two years and $2.5 million, Brandon Duhaime on a reported three-year deal in the $2.6 million range, Nick Paul arriving as the third-line centre. Those are all competent NHL bodies. None of them is a genuine deterrent.

MacEwen is the deterrent, and there is a defensible logic to carrying one on a roster whose franchise player just lost a season to a knee injury reportedly caused by a hit from Anaheim's Radko Gudas. Whether an enforcer actually prevents anything is one of hockey's oldest unresolved arguments, and this is not the piece that settles it. But it is clearly what the signing is for.

The second reading is more prosaic: at $875,000 with no term risk beyond 2027-28, MacEwen is exactly the kind of contract a cap-strapped team signs as a 13th or 14th forward. If he is healthy and useful, that is excellent value. If he is not, the money is small enough to bury or move.

The problem: seven bodies, four jobs

Except burying him is not simple, and that is where this gets interesting.

Count the checking forwards on Toronto's roster: Sissons, Blueger, Duhaime, Steven Lorentz at $1.35 million, Dakota Joshua, and MacEwen. That is six players for what is realistically four fourth-line and extra-forward jobs, before you account for Jack Roslovic and Nick Paul sitting above them, or for Easton Cowan and Gavin McKenna occupying top-nine minutes. We wrote in July that somebody good was going to get scratched. MacEwen's arrival makes that crunch worse, not better.

Now add the waiver problem. MacEwen is long past waiver exemption — 240 NHL games and a professional career stretching back most of a decade. Toronto cannot quietly assign him to the Marlies to see how the knee holds up. It has to expose him to all 31 other clubs, and a cheap, healthy, physical fourth-liner on a $875,000 cap hit is precisely the profile that gets claimed in late September when contending teams are hunting for depth at the bottom of their own lineups.

The same is true of Lorentz and Joshua. Toronto has assembled a bottom six where nearly everyone requires waivers, which means every roster decision in the final week of camp comes with a real cost. That is the practical consequence of the depth-signing strategy we flagged in our look at Toronto's rebuilt bottom six.

The cap and contract math makes it tighter

The roster crunch is not happening in a vacuum. PuckPedia projects Toronto roughly $2.75 million over the $104 million upper limit with a 23-player roster, and the club is also pressed against the 50-contract limit — a constraint we covered in our piece on why Chayka has to subtract.

Losing a player on waivers is one way to solve both problems at once. It is not a good way, but it is a way, and front offices facing this exact arithmetic often let the wire do work they would rather not do with a trade. If MacEwen is claimed, Toronto sheds $875,000 and a contract slot, and Chayka can say honestly that he tried.

The alternative is that he makes the team outright, which requires beating out at least one of Lorentz or Joshua in a four-preseason-game window while coming off ACL surgery. That is a genuinely difficult ask. The new collective bargaining agreement's shortened exhibition schedule hurts nobody more than a player whose case has to be made through physical play in live game situations. The two dates against Montreal and two against Ottawa are the entirety of his audition.

Our take: the signing is fine, the roster fit is not

This is the rare depth move where the contract is defensible and the plan is muddled. At $875,000, MacEwen is a sensible flyer — the sort of low-cost swing that occasionally returns a useful 60-game fourth-liner and never hurts you financially if it does not.

But signing him on July 1, after already committing real term and money to Sissons, Blueger and Duhaime, meant stacking a seventh checking forward onto a group that was already oversubscribed. That is not roster construction. That is accumulation. And when the accumulated players all require waivers, the club has manufactured a situation where it will almost certainly lose an asset for nothing in the last week of September.

The version of this that works is narrow: MacEwen arrives at camp visibly healthy, wins a job on merit, and Toronto moves Joshua or Lorentz in a trade for a mid-round pick rather than losing anyone on the wire. Chayka has shown he will make small trades — the Samuel Ersson flip to Ottawa was exactly that kind of housekeeping. It is possible. It is just not the base case.

What's next

MacEwen's camp is a medical story before it is a hockey one. The first thing to watch is whether he is a full participant on day one or in a non-contact sweater, because ACL recoveries in physical players are rarely linear and a limited start effectively ends the competition. Our pre-camp injury report covers the bigger medical questions facing Toronto this month.

After that, watch the preseason deployment. If MacEwen is playing regular shifts against Ottawa's NHL group on Sept. 23 rather than in the split-squad game four days earlier, the coaching staff is taking his case seriously. If he is in the first exhibition game and then disappears, the decision has already been made internally.

Our prediction: MacEwen is placed on waivers in the final days of camp, gets claimed by a team with less forward depth, and Toronto absorbs the loss without much complaint. It will be a footnote. It will also be a small, avoidable one, and the kind of thing a front office in its first full season together learns from.