Maple Leafs Make Blockbuster Trade With Columbus Ahead of Roster Deadline, Acquire and Extend Kirill Marchenko
The Toronto Maple Leafs made a massive splash on Monday afternoon, acquiring star forward Kirill Marchenko from the Columbus Blue Jackets in a six-player deal with no shortage of storylines and angles attached to it.
The full deal reveals itself as follows:
| To Toronto | To Columbus |
|---|---|
| F Kirill Marchenko F Miles Wood G Elvis Merzlikins* * salary retained | F Matthew Knies F Steven Lorentz D Emil Andrae 2027 2nd Round Pick (via Seattle) |
Leafs Get The Big Prize In Marchenko
This was a sweepstakes that many were surprised to see the Leafs’ names appear in connection to over the past few weeks, as many were unsure how they’d be able to make it work. But now they’re here, and they’re adding a very high-end player to the group.
The 26-year-old enters his fifth year in the league. His rookie year was one of the great “Cy Young” runs in recent memory, as he scored 21 goals and just 4 assists in 59 games after an early December call-up to the Blue Jackets. His sophomore season saw him round out his contributions a bit more, before exploding for 31 goals and 74 points in 2024/25. While he didn’t quite match that this year, he still pulled out a very respectable 27 goals and 67 points as a follow-up.
A stat that has made the rounds today is Marchenko’s tilt on goal differential over the past three years – his on-ice goal share of 61.5% is second only to Nathan MacKinnon among players who have played over 3000 minutes. To temper expectations somewhat, this is a bit deceiving, as he also has the highest on-ice save-percentage (0.932) and PDO (SH% + SV%, 103.7) among players in that threshold as well. While I might be able to give a more offensively-minded goal scorer like Marchenko some leeway on inflation via finishing, inflation via prevention is something I’d presume to be more luck-driven than deliberate.
All the same, Marchenko’s impact on shot attempts has generally been on the positive side in Columbus, and there is so much to like about his game. He is one of the league’s most explosive skaters, and has consistently shown himself to be a plus finisher with a heavy, accurate shot. He’s shown strength in transition across most of this seasons and has legitimate bright spots as a play driver.
Toronto were quick to ensure that they wouldn’t end up in an uncertain place with the winger, who was on the last year of a contract that pays him just $3.85 million per season. The Maple Leafs immediately announced a six-year, $75,000,000 extension, carrying an AAV of $12,500,000 per year.
It’s a definite sticker shock to see him become the team’s second-highest paid player immediately, but given the current salary cap trend lines pointing towards “utter explosion” and the acceleration in league market value created by the Leo Carlsson offer sheet this summer, this deal hovers in and around fair market value.
Knies Saga Finally Finds Closure
Of course, you have to give to get when it comes to deals like this, and the Leafs’ “give” was Matthew Knies. The temperature across Toronto implies bittersweet feelings, and understandably so.
On one hand, Knies is a home-grown talent, and maybe the only second-wave player of this era to be a true home run out of the draft. Selected in the second round in 2021, Knies blossomed into a legitimate top-six option over his three seasons in Toronto, including 58 and 66 point years. He signed a six-year contract extension before last season that felt mildly rich in the moment, but felt likely to appreciate well at a $7.75 million cap hit. He gave Auston Matthews an Arizona buddy, and scoring in the playoffs in his pre-rookie stint in 2022/23 was a feel-good moment.
Knies also had a lot of attractive raw tools. He was not only 6’3, but built like a bully at over 230 pounds. He protects the puck very well, and he has a willingness to get to the net. He’s a little more physical than the core forwards that he followed up, and that stands out to people, particularly in a market that is always yearning for grittier talent.
At the same time, Knies has struggled when asked to be the play-creator on his lines. Many of his teammates, particularly the stars he’s usually attached to, either don’t miss much of a beat without him or are even more productive in his absence. His time away from Auston Matthews in particular does not look flattering at all, and that’s a legitimate concern to have. While adding Gavin McKenna has obviously helped a ton in terms of the long view, you hope for a player like Knies to eventually be the one in the driver’s seat with this group, and he simply didn’t show the decision-making or creativity to imply he’d get there. Plus, as much as the physical traits are good in theory, he wasn’t exactly growing towards a fearsome player either. He’d throw hits as part of the flow of play, but wasn’t a player who would inflict pain. He wasn’t one of the guys who would jump in for his teammates. These aren’t things that players have to be, but when you’re one of the biggest players on the team and sold as one of the league’s few power forwards, they’re implied features that weren’t really delivered.
The possibility of him building out those features and building upon his already existing tools has created a long-standing market for Knies, who turns 24 next month. Toronto famously almost traded him to Chicago in a deal for Brandon Hagel and Marc-Andre Fleury in 2022, and narrowly missed the trade deadline cutoff to trade him to the Montreal Canadiens for a futures-driven package in March, sending in the deal to the league moments too late. He’s also been connected to several other near-deals over the past few years, including with Columbus earlier this offseason, so it almost feels like a favour to put him out of a four-year pattern of uncertainty.
What To Do With Elvis Merzlikins
One of the biggest surprises of this deal was the inclusion of Elvis Merzlikins, who is a goaltender with a $5,400,000 salary on a team that already has one of the most expensive goaltending tandems in the league.
Merzlikins, 32, started his career strong with three above-average seasons in Columbus, including two playoff games against the Maple Leafs – a shutout win and an overtime loss. Since beginning this current contract, though, he has had significantly less success, not once crossing the 0.900 line for save percentage and giving up 55 goals above league average across four years. So why do the Leafs want him?
Simply put, they probably don’t. They’re bringing him in to make the cap number work. Columbus is retaining 18% of the deal to balance things out, bring his cap hit down to $4.43 million. That’s still a premium for a goaltender who will never play – but it’s not so bad as a goaltender who likely can’t play anyway. Merzlikins underwent shoulder surgery in late August and is out for an undetermined amount of time while he recovers.
This means that the Maple Leafs can put him on Long Term Injured Reserve – possibly even season-ending LTIR. While the Blue Jackets wanted to avoid this scenario, as LTIR isn’t as simple as getting free cap space and is used more as a tag-down of overages. But if you’re already going to bleed into LTIR, you may as well bleed all the way through, and that’s where the Leafs come into play. Toronto is already expected to be in the LTIR zone with Max Domi, and thus can add some more to the bucket while Merzlikins recovers or otherwise decides on his future.
So do we see him play at some point this year? Probably not for the Leafs, but maybe somewhere if his recovery is fast enough and he’s determined. Toronto will have some work to do to manage that if it’s the case – likely an AHL conditioning stint followed by a trade – but it’s a football they can kick forward.
On The Fringes
The other player coming back to Toronto is Miles Wood, who has three years remaining on a risk-reward bet that hasn’t gone too great in recent years. Wood was a sneaky-popular depth player with the New Jersey Devils, playing pieces of eight seasons there and showing himself off as one of the league’s fastest skaters, while also being willing to throw the body every now and again. The Colorado Avalanche signed him to a six-year deal in hopes that he would fit their system in the summer of 2023, and he found himself lost in the numbers shuffle just two years later, included in a trade for Charlie Coyle after an injury-ridden season where he only scored eight points in 37 games.
Wood’s only year in Columbus was rather pedestrian, scoring 14 points in 54 games. You wonder if he just wasn’t the right fit there, though, and you immediately wonder if his mobility might afford him a look on Toronto’s third or fourth line. Personally, I’d be tempted to try him with Easton Cowan and Nick Paul on the third unit, though Colton Sissons might have that opportunity to start. Toronto is no rush to make a decision, though, as Wood and about a million dollars of his $2,500,000 cap hit cleared waivers earlier this week, allowing him to start with the Marlies if need be.
Going the other way in this are Steven Lorentz and Emil Andrae. Lorentz isn’t much of a shock – like Wood, he found himself in a lineup shuffle and cleared waivers this week, and he hasn’t been an AHLer since 2020. That a team would want to give him a depth role is of no surprise. Toronto moving on from Andrae after identifying him as a meaningful piece in the Joseph Woll trade and signing him to a two-year extension just three months ago feels more surprising, though signing Nick Blankenburg this weekend gave the team an undersized depth defenceman too many. Toronto might look back at moving on from Andrae without a single regular season game played as short-sighted in the future, though with all the mechanics involved here, they may have had no choice, and pre-filled their backup plan with Blankenburg.
Overall Thoughts
For months, I’ve been talking about the possibility of selling high on Matthew Knies. The question I often asked was “Is he Rick Nash, or is he Nikolai Kulemin, and what does the market think he is?”. If we feel he’s the latter, but the market feels him to be the former, then as much as I like all three names in this comparison, it’s a market that was worth exploring.
Does this deal satisfy that talk? Well, it’s a mixed bag. I don’t know that Marchenko is as “sexy” of a name as many expected when there was talk of Knies moving for very high draft picks, or possibly for a player like Zach Werenski. But markets shift, and in the case of the pursuit of a top defenceman, Toronto managed to find someone they believe to be one in Darren Raddysh in free agency, opening the potential scope a little wider.
As much as Knies’ tools and his homegrown story are a shame to lose, I do firmly believe the Maple Leafs walk out with the best player in this deal, and that matters. The overall package implies that the team continues to pursue a return to the speed and creativity they ripped away from themselves in recent years, and didn’t feel that those they sent out brought enough in other elements of their games to offset that. Getting a commitment from Marchenko right off the hop at decent value makes the complications an even easier pill to swallow.
There are certainly questions about how this whole offseason overhaul will play out, most would agree that work is still needed, and I could see the hindsight on this deal going plenty of different ways. But ultimately, I feel that the team has made a fairly reasonable bet to get closer to their targeted identity today.
