Patrik Laine Is NOT A Fit For Maple Leafs: NHL Analyst

Word began to spread last week that unsigned free agent Patrik Laine still had five teams with potential interest in bringing him in. One of those five that was listed by Herb Zurkowsky of the Montreal Gazette, happened to be the Toronto Maple Leafs. 

But would the oft-injured former Montreal Canadien be a reasonable fit for Toronto? Not according to TSN hockey analyst Frankie Corrado. As he explained on First Up on Tuesday morning, there might be a team out there that says, "'We'll take a flier on him, maybe we'll bring him in on a PTO and work him in on our two preseason games and see what he can do for us there.'" But for the Leafs and their needs? 

Not for Toronto... Because... for as poorly as they played last year, scoring wasn't the issue for them. They were pretty potent offensively. They were just a mess defensively. And they looked just as discombobulated as their defensive numbers would tell you they were. Patrik Laine is not helping that situation. So it feels like it would be a redundancy.

He's also a really one-dimensional player. Like, he has to play a very specific role, on a specific line, and the puck has to go through him a lot on the power-play. There's just not that need for the Leafs. So I wouldn't go down that road. 

Looking at the stats, to be honest, it might be a bit of an overstatement to say that the Leafs were "pretty potent" offensively. They finished 16th in the NHL in goals per game, smack dab in the middle of the pack. 

And the power play? Don't get us started on that. We all saw what a disaster that special teams unit was, so much so that they had to fire the assistant coach who was in charge of it, Marc Savard, mid-season. Granted, it certainly improved significantly in the second half of the season, including a 44.4% success rate in the shortened schedule in February. That brought them all the way up from dead last to 15th in the league in PP% by the end of the year, at 21.7%. 

Laine would be 'a redundancy' for the Leafs, says analyst

So while it might be a little more fair to say that the offense was more of a mixed bag overall, perhaps more to Corrado's point that Laine would be "a redundancy", the offseason signing of Jack Roslovic, further improvement from Matthew Knies, plus, most importantly, the hoped-for bounce-back from Auston Matthews, might be all Toronto needs to improve on offense. 

Plus, all the other moves that new GM John Chayka made, bringing in a ton of new bodies for the bottom six, might also make for a bit of a crowded forward group, not leaving room for a one-trick pony like Laine.