The first sideshow of the season came to an end on Wednesday night with the Toronto Maple Leafs announcing the long-awaited Timothy Liljegren trade. The team’s first-round pick struggled to make a good impression under new head coach Craig Berube, only suiting up for one game this season and more-or-less losing his job to Conor Timmins out of training camp. While no formal trade request was made, it was evident that both sides were on board with a fresh start and when the San Jose Sharks made the call, they pulled the trigger. The final trade ended up being Liljegren to the Sharks in exchange for defenceman Matt Benning, a 2025 third-round pick, and the Sharks’ sixth-round pick in 2026.
Trade:
To #sjsharks: D Timothy Liljegren
To #LeafsForever: Matt Benning, 2025 3rd Rd Pick, SJS 2026 6th Rd PickSharks have EDM and COL third-round picks and Leafs will get the earlier of them.
— Frank Seravalli (@frank_seravalli) October 30, 2024
Liljegren was selected 17th overall by the Maple Leafs in 2017, a pick that looked like it might carry some steal potential at the time considering his initial projection as a top-five pick. A case of mono in his draft year tanked his stock a little bit and he ended up falling to the Leafs in the middle of the first round. He spent the next four years give-or-take growing his game with the Toronto Marlies in the AHL, but from his first full season in 2021-22 to the present day, he was never fully able to gain the trust of former head coach Sheldon Keefe. Although there were bursts where his potential was on full display, he routinely found himself on the bench in the playoffs in favour of heavier defencemen and made just enough mistakes at crucial moments to keep him from being a mainstay in the lineup.
I was a fan of Liljegren’s game and was a proponent of putting him in the top four and giving him ice time so he could showcase his skills properly, but at the same time, it’s hard to blame Keefe or Berube for not putting his development over the success of the team. He didn’t play well enough in preseason to justify taking ice time away from Oliver Ekman-Larsson or Chris Tanev, and if there was ever going to be a world where he skated in the top four with this iteration of the team, he needed to prove to Berube that he could be effective in a limited role, and he didn’t do that. You can make the argument that he never had much of an opportunity to begin with, but it was the same way under Keefe, and there was a much larger sample size. And if the Leafs ever opted not to upgrade on defence and instead trust Liljegren with those minutes, whoever the GM was at the time would have been under fire for not upgrading if that experiment went poorly.
If there’s one thing this trade tells me, it’s that the Leafs desperately need to get better results out of their next wave of defensive prospects. The main concern I’ve seen online following Jake McCabe’s contract extension is that their entire top four is over the age of 30 and all locked in for the next four years at least. While this might not be the most ideal situation, they also didn’t have much of a choice considering the sheer lack of defensive prospects from the Mark Hunter/Kyle Dubas eras who were able to make an impact. Rasmus Sandin, selected 29th overall in 2018, fell into the same situation and was traded to the Washington Capitals at the 2023 trade deadline following the acquisitions of McCabe and Luke Schenn. While Sandin’s situation was more due to how quickly he developed and how much of a logjam there was on the back end by the time he was ready, he wasn’t able to force the Leafs into keeping him with his play. They drafted Sean Durzi, who’s turned into a fine defenceman, in a package for Jake Muzzin back in 2019. Outside of those two, who have the Leafs developed into a regular, contributing defenceman?
The Leafs made 16 picks through the crucial 2017 and 2018 drafts.
After the Timothy Liljegren trade, just one player from those drafts — sixth round pick Pontus Holmberg — remains in the organization.
— Joshua Kloke (@joshuakloke) October 30, 2024
Whether it’s 2020 third-round pick Topi Niemela, 2023 seventh-round pick Noah Chadwick, or 2024 first-round pick Ben Danford, the Leafs need at least one of those players to turn into somebody who can contribute on the back end as their current top-four gets older. Danford and Niemela seem to have realistic projections as top-four defencemen if their development goes smoothly, and Chadwick is a little bit of a wildcard considering how quickly his game has progressed forward following his draft year, but those three prospects are their top three defenders in the system, and eventually, they’ll need one of them to step in and contribute.
That’s not to say there’s a need to rush any of these players either. The team has clearly committed to Rielly, Ekman-Larsson, McCabe, and Tanev as their top four for the next three to four years at least, but if they can’t replace any of those players from in-house, there’s going to be more signings of 30+-year-old defencemen to multi-year contracts, which won’t be ideal at a time when the Leafs’ core players will be on the wrong side of 30. Three defencemen drafted between 2016 and 2020 turning into NHL players isn’t good enough, especially since all three have been traded to other teams at this point. We’re seeing the effects of the Leafs having some cheap secondary scoring help from in-house additions such as Matthew Knies and Bobby McMann, and while it may not come in the form of goals, they need their pipeline defenders to make a similar impact over the next couple of years.
