Leafs Top 50 Prospects –  Sawyer Boulton

The Toronto Maple Leafs organization has drafted and developed a number of youngsters currently playing in the NHL (Auston Matthews, William Nylander, Morgan Rielly, Matthew Knies), but the club under former GM’s Kyle Dubas and Brad Treliving, and new GM John Chayka, has had different ideas of what kind of prospects they wanted to populate the organization with. 

As we’ve done on a yearly basis, we will be ranking the club’s top prospects over the upcoming weeks based on their progress in either the NCAA, CHL, Europe, ECHL, or AHL, and their potential to make the Leafs roster and make a contribution in the future.

Players are eligible for the list if they have not played more than 82 NHL games and are 25 years old or younger:

Leafs Prospect List

#50 – Blake Smith – D (Toronto – AHL)

#49 – Henrik Rybinski – F (Hershey – AHL)

#48 – Sawyer Boulton – F (Reading – ECHL, Lehigh Valley – AHL)

Players with NHL bloodlines are usually given more of an opportunity to see if they can follow in their father’s footsteps. There is no guarantee that will result in success, as we saw last season with goalie Cayden Primeau, who was in the Montreal system for years and was claimed by the Leafs in October, but did not display any sign of being capable of playing in the league, despite getting cracks with the Habs every year since 2019-20.

Another example of this is Sawyer Boulton, son of former NHL enforcer Eric Boulton, who played 654 games for four NHL clubs over 15 seasons. The 22-year-old winger played his youth hockey on Long Island and for the Buffalo Jr. Sabres, compiling 271 penalty minutes at three levels in 2021-22. After playing 30 games, going pointless, and piling up 110 penalty minutes for El Paso of the NAHL in 2022-23, he split time between the Rochester Jr. Americans and as a teammate of Calder Cup winners Landon Sim and Easton Cowan with the London Knights in 2023-24.

He scored three goals in 40 games and 16 playoff games for the Knights on their failed run to the Memorial Cup before signing an AHL deal with the Philadelphia Flyers. In both seasons, Boulton split time between ECHL Reading and AHL Lehigh Valley, compiling 171 penalty minutes in 53 games. Last month, the Leafs signed the rugged winger to an AHL deal.

While the likelihood of Boulton ever getting to where his father played is slim, he is still young enough that he could develop into a useful enforcer at the AHL level.