2025 Draft Recap: Toronto Maple Leafs
Treliving’s vision for a tougher Maple Leafs identity crystallizes in another draft class heavy on muscle and edge.
NASHVILLE (The Draft Analyst) — Brad Treliving’s plan to reverse the fortunes of this perennial playoff underachiever is neither ambitious nor revolutionary. He simply wants his team to maintain its high-octane attack and consistent attention to detail—at least the kind they deliver during the regular season—but with the added element of physicality on every shift. This desired end state — a Stanley Cup won with intimidation by both skill and force — has been achieved by every champion of this decade, including the 2019 St. Louis Blues under former NHL pugilist Craig Berube, the man Treliving hired as head coach on May 17, 2024, to replace Sheldon Keefe following the Maple Leafs’ seventh first-round exit in eight years.
Even Treliving’s bookish predecessor, Kyle Dubas, who was also dismissed after that loss to Boston in 2024, often attempted to beef up Toronto’s lineup at the trade deadline with hard-nosed, grizzled additions. These efforts proved both costly in assets and inconsequential come playoff time—and ultimately hampered Treliving’s ability to prepare his own roster for the 2024 and 2025 postseasons.
Although the switch from Dubas to Treliving didn’t generate immediate results beyond the Toronto’s usual century-mark output in the standings, there’s enough evidence to suggest the latter has already left his imprint on the organization and will continue purging his staff of Dubas appointments, including in the scouting department. Under Dubas, Maple Leafs area scouts appeared hamstrung by a combination of halved draft classes (the Leafs owned only one first-rounder and 11 picks total in Dubas’ last three drafts as Toronto GM) and a shameless aversion to bigger prospects — 22 of the 35 Maple Leafs draftees under Dubas were listed under six feet tall, the NHL’s highest percentage of its kind within that span. Of course, this is most relevant when considering the paltry sum of combined NHL games played by that diminutive bunch, from which only the since-traded defenseman Rasmus Sandin has played at least one full NHL season.
Still, it’s not as though Treliving’s conventional strategies during his lengthy tenure as GM of the Calgary Flames produced tangible results in the playoffs. Much like the Maple Leafs under Dubas, Treliving’s Flames never reached a conference final, despite two Pacific Division–winning seasons in which Calgary won 50 games. But in terms of NHL talent produced from Flames draft classes, the numbers tilt significantly in Treliving’s favor: Calgary drafts between 2015 and 2020 yielded 10 NHL regulars, not including forwards Dillon Dube (2016 draft) and Adam Ruzicka (2017), each of whom were essentially pushed out of the league due to shameful off-ice behavior.
Where the credit for Calgary’s draft-day proficiency lies is up for minor debate, as most know a GM has only so much influence over the actual list. Still, analyzing a Maple Leafs draft class objectively requires acceptance of two basic truths—neither of which is laudatory. First, the Leafs rarely hit on post–first-round selections, a reality compounded by their trading of top-32 picks in four of the last seven drafts, and the unfortunate, sudden death of 2020 first-rounder Rodion Amirov. Present-day NHL rosters remain dotted with former Maple Leafs draft picks, several of whom beat the odds by becoming NHL regulars despite being selected outside the first round. Although building a halfway-decent NHL roster from those same players is out of the question, it remains true that Toronto scouts weren’t entirely inept at unearthing pro-level talent from the depths of the draft.
Ah, but there’s a catch—and you probably spotted it in that last point: Maple Leafs scouts weren’t incapable of hitting late; they used to have the magic touch. From that, one can infer the obvious: that finding NHL-caliber players in recent years has been increasingly frustrating for Toronto’s scouts, with or without the excuse that draft capital—which helps fuel consistent regular-season success—doesn’t come cheap. The Leafs’ habitual losing was a defining characteristic of the post-lockout era.
To sharpen the image, consider how Maple Leafs player development has stalled significantly by comparing two sizable draft-year samples: 2005 to 2014, and 2015 to the present.
Of the 58 players Toronto drafted outside of Round 1 between 2005 and 2014, a healthy total of 18 (or 31.0 percent) appeared in at least 180 NHL games, and six were full-time NHLers as recently as last season. There are several ways to explain this better-than-average success rate beyond luck or a keen eye for talent—beginning with the fact that the Maple Leafs, having been less competitive immediately following the 2004–05 lockout, faced fewer lineup restrictions due to constant roster turnover. It’s also worth noting that Toronto’s leadership during this forgettable period in franchise history changed three times (four, if you count Cliff Fletcher’s return as an interim hire after John Fergusonwas fired in 2008)
Conversely, only six of Toronto’s 52 non–first-round selections between 2015 and 2021 have played 150 or more NHL games, and only two — Utah defenseman Sean Durzi and current Leafs top-six forward Matthew Knies — have been consistent, everyday contributors. To be fair, 2016 third-rounder Jospeh Woll is now an established NHL goalie, but he was acquired nine years ago. For all the love Maple Leafs supporters want to shower upon a fan-favorite like Nick Robertson, the truth is the 2019 second-rounder is about to turn 24 without ever notching a 70-game or 30-point NHL season.
Anyway, there isn’t any concrete evidence suggesting Treliving is more involved in the scouting and draft process than the average general manager, which allows us to infer that the marching orders he provides his scouts are more loosely defined than strictly prescriptive. To his credit, during his short tenure running the Toronto Maple Leafs, Treliving never once tap-danced around the organization’s glaring need for impact defensemen — from the prospect level on up. His track record in Calgary of using the draft to address that need reveals more success than failure, notably the selections of NHL regulars Rasmus Andersson, Adam Fox, and Juuso Valimaki in three consecutive drafts from 2015 through 2017.
But the draft, as an event, has never been solely about prospects and playing the long game for Treliving. In addition to overseeing mostly solid and uncontroversial draft-day selections, Treliving uses the weekend — or the lead-up to the proceedings — to bolster his existing lineup through trades. And give the man credit: he doesn’t get cheated.
In 2015, barely a year into the job in Calgary, Treliving acquired a budding star from Boston in defenseman Dougie Hamilton in exchange for three high draft picks. A year later, he nabbed goalie Brian Elliott (for a second-rounder that the St. Louis Blues turned into perennial 70-point winger Jordan Kyrou), and in 2017, Treliving landed another marquee defender when he paid a steep price in high-round selections for Travis Hamonic. From there, it was mostly draft-pick-related deals, but the point stands — Treliving has never shown an aversion to risk when it comes to trading futures, including situations involving moves up or down the draft board.
As for the 2025 class, Treliving and Scouting Director Mark Leach, who took the job one week after Wes Clark bolted to rejoin Dubas in Pittsburgh, didn’t tap-dance around the fact that they intended to resume their quest for bigger, tougher players —much like they did in 2024, in what turned out to be a defense-heavy haul. The Toronto pipeline has suffered from misfires and bad luck in recent years, but 'changing the DNA' of the organization at the club level was expected to include the 2025 draft as well.
“I’m just looking for the best available talent (at pick No. 64). A guy who works and competes hard….At that point in the draft there are players with a few issues in their game. If they didn’t, they’re in the top 10.”
Maple Leafs scouting director Mark Leach, on the type of player he was looking to draft at 64th overall.
2025 Draft Pick Review
2nd Round, 64th Overall — Tinus-Luc Koblar, C (Leksands J20, Nationell) — The Leafs at one point were without a 2025 second-round pick before swinging a 2024 draft-day deal with Florida in which they sent their 2024 second-rounder to Florida for this pick and an extra 2024 seventh-rounder (225th overall) that Toronto used on WHL puck-mover Nathan Mayes. It was in that same 2024 draft when Toronto took a dip into the Leksands J20 talent pool to come away with impressive puck-mover Victor Johansson, so it’s obvious they had a good sense of Koblar’s hyper-competitiveness, which chief scout Mark Leach mentioned as one of the prominent measurables that attracted them to the hulking Norwegian center in the first place. Ahh, but there’s a catch, as Koblar was basically a bottom-sixer (and produced like one) in divisional play, and he was limited to just two assists in 10 combined tournament games for Norway at the D1A U20 and U18 World Championships. Granted, Leksands J20 was a deep, competitive team built on defense and goaltending, and Koblar had a role in their wire-to-wire success. Still, he wasn’t a pronounced play-driving center and struggled at the dot for most of last season. The optimist will say this is around the area where Leafs scouts snagged current top-six mainstay Matthew Knies back in 2021, but take my word for it: Koblar is a galaxy away from equaling the latter’s scoring touch and creativity, nor was he ever considered a first-rounder like Knies was. This pick was a textbook reach.
3rd Round, 86th Overall — Tyler Hopkins, C (Kingston Frontenacs, OHL) — Drafted with the pick acquired from San Jose (via Nashville and Colorado) for Timothy Liljegren, Hopkins was similar to Koblar in many ways, beginning with providing intangibles and special-teams play for a contending team. What was starkly different came in the form of raw production, however, as neither Koblar’s J20 Nationell nor Hopkins’ OHL are statistically goalie-friendly, yet it was the former averaging less than half a point per game while the latter hit the 20–30 mark in 67 OHL contests. Why the lesser of the two went nearly a full round higher is anybody’s guess, but the bigger takeaway is that the Leafs used their first two picks on centers for the first time since 2013. Interestingly enough, that particular draft featured the bigger center prospect — 6-foot-5 checker Frederik Gauthier, who went 21st overall — going higher than the average-sized Carter Verhaeghe (82nd overall), and we all know how that turned out. Anyway, I tabbed Hopkins as a recommended Leafs target mostly because of his size, physicality, and penalty killing, thinking they probably aren’t going to be dissatisfied if that’s all he gives them, even though he has the highest scoring upside of any of Toronto’s 2025 picks.
5th Round, 137th overall — Will Belle, LW (U.S. U18, NTDP) -- Taking the gargantuan Belle with the pick acquired from Pittsburgh for oft-injured defenseman Conor Timmins and scrappy checker Connor Dewar was the second time in three selections where Maple Leafs scouts took on a clear-cut project who rarely, if ever, showed extended periods of play-driving. Granted, he’s a fifth-round pick, which by itself doesn’t mean drafting him was a mistake, nor does it limit Belle’s chances of developing into a nasty checking-line missile at the AHL or even NHL level. Still, the Notre Dame commit was never a dedicated top-nine option who made sound decisions consistently while skating for an all-teen NTDP lineup, let alone produced, as Belle finished with only four goals and 12 assists in 53 games.
5th Round, 153rd overall — Harry Nansi, RW (Owen Sound Attack, OHL) — The doubling down on forwards with size continued in the late stages of the fifth round, where the Leafs went back to the local pool and selected this rambunctious Nepean native. Nansi offers very little beyond his 6-foot-3 frame and edgy style, although his sense for the game — beyond forechecking and battling — is nowhere near the level of the average middle-round CHL forward. The good news for Nansi and nearly all of Toronto’s 2025 picks is that, for now, there is no place to go but up. It was at this point in the draft, however, where the Leafs clearly tailored their final pre-draft list to nothing but grinders and checkers — almost another way of saying they were being reactionary instead of prioritizing, or at least considering, high-ceiling types who had the apparent misfortune of being listed under 6-foot-1.
6th Round, 185th overall — Rylan Fellinger, RHD (Flint Firebirds, OHL) — It would have been borderline foolish had the Maple Leafs passed on a right-shot defender; not with the pipeline’s 2:1 disparity between lefties and righties. They certainly could have addressed it sooner by going for a prospect who moves the needle beyond towering over the OHL’s average-sized forwards and killing plays in the low slot because of his reach. To be fair, Fellinger is the the type of righty defensive specialist the Leafs actually needed, with puck-movers Topi Niemela (64th overall in 2020) and Ben Danford (31st overall in 2024) already rising on the organizational depth chart. Leach called Fellinger a “two-way” type, but that sounded more like a projection for his final year in the OHL than what he’s actually done in two full seasons with Flint. A native of Wawa, Ont., Fellinger was the 255th pick in the 2023 OHL Priority Selection. Talk about a meteoric rise.
7th Round, 217th overall — Matthew Hlcar, LW (Kitchener Rangers, OHL) — I’d like to think I watched enough to Kitchener this season to definiteively label Hlacar (pronounced La-Char) as a potential double-overage draftee in 2026 above anything else. But the Leafs shot my projection all to shit, taking the pugnacious winger (and his seven goals and one assist in 43 games) late in the seventh round. First, the good news — Hlacar is a big, mean checker whose tenacity and physicality helped the Rangers with their reverse sweep over Windsor in the second round of the OHL playoffs. No, he wasn’t scoring, which should be a shock considering the Binbrook, Ont. native was never drafted into the OHL and played in the GOJHL the season prior. The bad? He was always, and I mean always, stapled to the fourth line and never saw time on special teams despite being an overager who at a minimum could have been used on PP2 as a net-front presence. This is a situation where the Leafs were likely impressed with his postseason in which he scored a single goal on a whopping four shots in 14 games.
Odd and Ends
· As mentioned earlier, the Maple rarely select centers with each of their first two picks. They last did so in 2013, when they selected Frederik Gauthier at 21st overall and Carter Verhaeghe with the 82nd pick, and before that it goes all the way back to 2000, when the Buds secured Brad Boyes (24th overall) and Kris Vernarsky (51st).
· The four OHL prospects taken were the most since Toronto acquired four at the 2018 draft and tied for the largest OHL catch since the draft was reduced to seven rounds in 2005. They took seven OHL’ers in 1975, 1977, and 1986.
· The selection of power winger Will Belle made him the first U.S. NTDP draftee to don the blue and white since 2016, when the Leafs took goalie Joseph Woll and defenseman J.D. Greenway each in the third round.
· Take away center Tyler Hopkins’ respectable production, and the other five Leafs draft picks collectively averaged a paltry 0.28 points per game in offense-friendly junior leagues.
· The Chicago Blackhawks drafted towering Czech winger Vaclav Nestrasil with the 2025 first-rounder acquired from Toronto in the multi-player Jake McCabe trade executed by former Leafs’ GM Kyle Dubas at the 2023 trade deadline. The final tally won’t be determined until Chicago uses Toronto’s 2026 second-rounder, but the current tally can be updated to read a now-extended McCabe, 19 games from physical checker Sam Lafferty (now with Chicago), a 2024 fifth-rounder that was used on talented Czech center Miroslav Holinka , and a conditional 2025 third-rounder (more on that down below) to Toronto for minor-league winger Joey Anderson (still with the Hawks), undrafted winger Pavel Gogolev (now in the KHL), the Nestrasil pick (25th overall), and next year’s aforementioned second-rounder.
· Toronto’s original 2025 second-round pick landed at 57th overall, but that was after the Maple Leafs had already traded it to the now-defunt Arizona Coyotes at the 2022 trade deadline as part of the deal for defenseman Ilya Lyubushkin. If you recall, the Coyotes had the option of a 2023 third-rounder or wait it out a few years for the pick to upgrade to the 2025 second. Their patience paid off in terms of draft positioning, but the pick wasn’t Arizona property for much longer, as it was shipped to the Tampa Bay Lightning in the deal for defenseman Mikhail Sergachev that was brokered at the 2024 draft. The Bolts held onto the pick for almost the entire 2024-25 season before relinquishing it to Seattle in the three-team trade that sent veteran forwards Yanni Gourde and Oliver Bjorkstrand to the Sunshine State. The Kraken then flipped it to Philadelphia in a Day 2 deal last June, with the Flyers taking big-bodied center Matthew Gard at 57th overall.
· For bookkeeping purposes, the aforementioned second-rounder swap with Florida that took place at the 2024 draft now reads Toronto’s 2024 second-round pick (57th overall) to Florida so that the Panthers could draft Djurgardens center Linus Eriksson in exchange for Florida’s 2024 seventh-rounder (used by the Leafs to draft defenseman Nathan Mayes at 225th overall) and the 2025 second-rounder (64th overall) was spent on Leksands J20 center Tinus Luc Koblar.
· The third-rounder Toronto secured to draft center Tyler Hopkins at 86th overall originally belonged to the Colorado Avalanche, who had initially traded it to the Nashville Predators (along with playmaking defense prospect Jeremy Hanzel) for veteran center Yakov Trenin and the rights to prospect Graham Sward at the 2024 trade deadline. Nashville then packaged it to the San Jose Sharks as part of last summer’s Yaroslav Askarov mega-deal, but San Jose got rid of it soon thereafter by shipping it to the Maple Leafs (with minor-league defender Matt Benning and a 2026 sixth-round selection also headed to Toronto) for defenseman Timothy Liljegren.
· Toronto’s original 2025 third-rounder (89th overall) was first traded to the Anaheim Ducks in 2024 for Ilya Lyubushkin’s repeat performance in Leaf Land. The Ducks then moved it to the New York Rangers as part of last June’s Chris Kreider trade. The Blueshirts drafted puck-rushing defenseman Artyom Gonchar, whose uncle Sergei appeared in over 1300 NHL games.
· It was at the 2025 trade deadline with the Maple Leafs snagged Philadelphia’s 2025 fourth-round pick (100th overall) as part of the Scott Laughton deal, but it was out of their hands within three hours. It was the Boston Bruins who eventually secured it from the Maple Leafs in the Brandon Carlo trade and used it to draft defenseman Vashek Blanar at Pick No. 100. In case you forgot, the Leafs also included notable center prospect Fraser Minten and a top-five-protected 2026 first-rounder in the Carlo deal with Boston.
· If the name Josh Pillar doesn’t ring a bell, it should. He was included in the three-team blockbuster trade in 2023 that briefly landed both him and center Ryan O’Reilly on the Maple Leafs' roster. Pillar, a right winger, also holds the rare distinction of having played in at least six WHL seasons (without ever scoring at least 20 goals, by the way). The Minnesota Wild helped broker the deal, receiving Toronto’s original 2025 fourth-round pick (121st overall), which they used to select North Bay winger Lirim Amidovski. For what it’s worth, Pillar — originally drafted by Minnesota in the fourth round of the 2020 NHL Draft — is currently playing college hockey in Canada, having never appeared in a minor-league game.
· Chicago’s conditional 2025 third-rounder mentioned in the McCabe trade actually dropped to a 2025 fifth (130th overall), which Toronto later sent to the Washington Capitals (along with a 2024 third-rounder that was used by Vegas to draft goalie Pavel Moysevich) at the 2024 trade deadline for nine games of defenseman Joel Edmundson. The Capitals then flipped the pick to Pittsburgh last November for ageless checker-extraordinaire Lars Eller, allowing the Penguins to draft crafty Portland Winterhawk center Ryan Miller at Pick No. 130. For those requesting my opinion, trading for 16 combined games of Edmundson for what turned out to be Moysevich and Miller looks like a poopy trade on Treliving’s ledger.
· Just to rehash, the Maple Leafs turned the combination of Timmins and Dewar into rugged winger Will Belle using Pittsburgh’s 2025 fifth-rounder.
Final Assessment: Below average
We got a sense of what a Brad Treliving–driven draft for the Maple Leafs would look like last year, when their scouts—for the first time in years—went entirely for size in addressing the defense. This year was all about the forward position, although the size component prevailed yet again. This shift in draft-day strategy is neither surprising nor guaranteed to work, even with full buy-in from his scouts on a seemingly organization-wide effort to make the Leafs a tougher out beyond their potent attack. Still, nearly all the players chosen were on the lower end of their respective junior team’s depth chart, and only Hopkins was drafted close to where he was expected to go.