The ship has sailed but I was really hoping to get Brown in the bottom-6 because he’s an exceptional penalty killer and still puts up 30 points / season with limited opportunity to do so.
One way of looking at it is that Marner scored roughly 30 goals but a healthy Auston Matthews will make up half of that. Nic Roy will contribute another 15 from the third line. If Maccelli works out, you get another 15 or so. The question isn’t the offense, per se, it is the penalty killing and the defensive awareness that Marner brought. As much as we all got frustrated when he’d screw up, he did make a lot of good defensive plays and was typically reading plays well and being in the right position to stop plays from developing. Maccelli has some larger shoes to fill there – a more mature Knies will help, a healthy Matthews will help – but I did want them to find a faster guy or two to enhance that PK.
Lots of summer left. Not a lot of options.
Yeah I’m not really seeing much of a free agent year for the leafs tbh. Everyone seemed to be expecting some sort of big move when all I’ve truly expected was a build up of the bottom six.
Maybe when it comes to replacing Marner the leafs will just use the most recent London Knight who won the Stafford Smythe Memorial Trophy 😉