Top Leafs stories of 2025 – When Brad Treliving got his flowers for Tavares, Knies extensions

DISCLAIMER: The ‘top stories’ are simply ranked based on how much traffic they garnered for our site over the past calendar year. This is not an opinionated Top 10.

Welcome to our final series of 2025 in which we’re taking a look at our top-10 best-performing articles of the calendar year. Starting today and going all the way until New Years Eve, we’re going to go over our ten highest articles from a traffic standpoint. We’re kicking things off today with one that feels awfully ill-timed to be reflecting on considering how the season has gone so far, but hey, we don’t make the rules!

While the various flaws of the 2025-26 Toronto Maple Leafs roster have been rearing their ugly heads lately, general manager Brad Treliving did a good job with the extensions of John Tavares and Matthew Knies over the summer. With the contract status of Mitch Marner still up in the air along with the worst-kept secret of all time that he would be signing with the Vegas Golden Knights, Treliving locked up two other pieces of his core to long-term deals. Tavares got a four-year extension worth $4.38 million annually and Knies was signed to a six-year extension worth $7.75 million annually. I wrote about these extensions in July and gave Treliving lots of credit for these signings, and while nobody’s in a rush to hand anything to Treliving right now, the point still stands on those specific transactions. Below is a snippet of what I wrote.

For all of the faults Kyle Dubas had during his tenure as Leafs general manager, there’s a legitimate argument to be made now that Brendan Shanahan was the true mastermind behind the Leafs’ initial contract negotiations with the core players. Sure, there was speculation of this before, and to assume Shanahan had zero say in those negotiations would have been naive. But, when the first two contract extensions of the post-Shanahan era end up being an extreme hometown discount and a team-friendly deal for a rising star that benefits both the team and the player, it shines a light on how the operation was running before this summer. Simply put, it’s a stark contrast from the awkward Mitch Marner/Kyle Dubas press conference after the former signed his $10.6 million deal, in which Dubas admitted that both the player would have wanted more while the team would have wanted to pay less. In other words, ‘neither of us are too thrilled with the outcome here’. 

Although the Leafs’ record is in a horrendous place right now, Tavares and Knies have still lived up to their extensions and they’re two of the transactions that are keeping Treliving’s seat from getting too hot. Tavares has 14 goals and 31 points in 33 games while Knies has 29 points in 32 games. Both players have struggled massively over the past month or so, but for what they’re making – especially Tavares, they’re getting good value out of both contracts.