Top Leafs stories of 2024: When Brad Treliving explained his 2024 free agency class

The 2024 offseason was Brad Treliving’s second as general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, but in many ways, it felt like his first.

The year before was a little bit messy in the sense that much of it was a transition offseason, taking the reins from Kyle Dubas, who was at the helm for the previous five years. The Maple Leafs had some holes to fill up front, highlighted by the signings of Tyler Bertuzzi and Max Domi to one-year contracts, but for a guy who emphasizes a strong defensive corps the way Treliving does, having John Klingberg be your only ‘big’ signing on defence for the offseason seemed a little out of character.

Fast forward a year, Auston Matthews and William Nylander were both locked into long-term deals, and Treliving had a year under his belt of watching his new team up close and figuring out what his team truly needed. As much as goal-scoring was a need, highlighted in the first round against the Boston Bruins, there’s less pressure to attack that front-and-centre when you’ve got a Core four composed of a 60-goal top-line centre, a Selke-worthy 90+ point winger, another star winger who set a career-high of 96 points that year, and another point-per-game capable centre. Ilya Lyubushkin and Joel Edmundson did their jobs on the back end after being acquired by the Maple Leafs at the 2024 trade deadline, but having those two playing the roles they were was never ideal for a team hoping to do more than just win a playoff round.

So, in Summer 2024, Treliving got to fully stretch his wings. He signed Chris Tanev and Oliver Ekman-Larsson to multi-year contracts and eventually brought in forwards Max Pacioretty and Steven Lorentz on one-year deals. There was also the report of signing defenceman Jani Hakanpaa to a two-year contract, which eventually materialized as a one-year deal months later. Below is a snippet from our 2024 offseason coverage where Treliving explained the logic behind his offseason plan, needing few words to get the point across.

“I’d rather have too many than not enough,” Treliving said of the team’s decision to prioritize Tanev, Ekman-Larsson and Hakanpaa on the opening day of free agency.

Shortly before free agency opened up, the Maple Leafs also announced a three-year extension for Joseph Woll.

“We have a lot of faith in Joe. That was a priority for us, to get ahead of that,” Treliving said of Woll to Terry Koshan of the Toronto Sun.

And, of course, with July 1 being the day that Mitch Marner’s no-move clause kicked in, Treliving also had to field some questions about whether or not there was any news on the contract front.

“No update on Mitch,” Treliving said via Koshan. “Mitch is a great player. We’re lucky to have him. Craig (Berube) alluded to it at his last press availability. He’s excited to coach him and we move forward. Mitch is training, preparing, getting ready for the season.

Although goal-scoring, particularly from their depth, has been hard to come by so far in 2024-25, Treliving’s defence-first approach seems to have paid off early on. Between a vastly-improved penalty kill and strong play in net, the Maple Leafs have improved both in the goals-against-per-game department (2.63/g, good for fifth in the NHL) and total penalty kill percentage (82.7%, good for seventh in the NHL.) It will take more than a better penalty kill to get the Maple Leafs out of the first round, but the 2024 offseason was a good start.