Maple Leafs’ priority should be a forward if they get to use their 1st-round pick

Taking the best player available regardless of position always seems like the right call. The problem is that when it comes to drafts where Connor McDavid or Sidney Crosby aren’t making it painfully clear who the best available player is, the idea is still somewhat subjective. The best player available argument doesn’t always hold up. It’s valid if you don’t need a goaltender and could select the next Patrick Roy over addressing a glaring need on defence where the best available player at the position has been compared to Erik Gudbranson.

The best available player is also an interesting one when talking about upside. You can head all the way back to the 2008 NHL Draft and look at the crop of defencemen at the top of the board. There were four can’t-miss targets available and everyone after Steven Stamkos was a defenceman. Two of the teams hit home runs with Alex Pietrangelo and Drew Doughty. The other two drafted long time NHLers in Luke Schenn and Zach Bogosian. No busts but a pretty noticeable difference on success.

Even in those examples that include two potentially future Hall of Fame defencemen, it is worth appreciating that Drew Doughty was an outlier in being able to come into the lineup immediately and make an impact as defencemen. Pietrangelo took two more years of development before he joined the Blues and found his success. There is something now quite humorous about the concept of building a team around Schenn or Zach Bogosian, or believing their either would turn around a franchise.

Even the success stories more often than not mirror Pietrangelo’s development path, rather than producing an impact similar to Doughty or Matthew Schaefer. For a team in a rebuild, a franchise defenceman is certainly a position worth waiting for, but the Maple Leafs need to head into this draft with some emphasis being put on immediate impact as a high value player that can make an impact on the Maple Leafs in 2026-27 might mean more to them than a player worth waiting for in 2028-29.

That creates a bit of a buyer beware situation around the defencemen in the draft for the Maple Leafs and in the unlikely event that Maple Leafs are picking in the top five, it might mean looking at players like Caleb Malhotra, Ethan Belchetz, Viggo Bjorck, and Oliver Suvanto should be priorities over the defensive options. With this group as well it seems like perceived NHL readiness should factor into the prioritization.

Looking at these players seems like a hypothetical stacked on top of a hypothetical. The most likely outcome will be the Bruins receive a very good pick from the Maple Leafs. The next most likely outcome is that the Maple Leafs are one of the 11 worst teams in the NHL and they win the draft lottery, resulting in the easy selection of either Ivar Stenberg or Gavin McKenna and they get their NHL-ready forward.

The scenario where forwards would need to be prioritized only falls into the situation where the Maple Leafs are either so bad that they end up being one of the five worst teams in the league and the lottery results don’t bump them out of that range, or that the Maple Leafs improve so much that they fall in the 12-16th worst teams in the NHL and their lottery win only moves them up into a range where they pick in the third, fourth, or fifth spot.

There is also the fact that organizationally the biggest prospect pool need is a high end offensive talent. Ben Danford is a solid defensive prospect, there are interesting middle of the lineup forwards, but the Leafs lack an offensive juggernaut. A forward would be the right call but given the odds of the Leafs getting to use their pick, I’m sure it would be hard to be upset with any selection.