Maple Leafs’ Nick Robertson makes TSN’s Trade Bait board at no. 40.

The 2024 NHL All-Star weekend is already here, which means the 2023-24 season is officially over the halfway mark as we head into February. Once the All-Star weekend festivities end, teams and fans will shift their focus to arguably the best time of the hockey season, for the fans at least. The trade deadline.

For the Toronto Maple Leafs, it’s been a weird season up to this point. Nobody knows whether this team should add or stay put at the trade deadline, keeping their limited draft capital and top prospects away until next season. However, when you have three of the best players in the league, all in their prime, it’s hard to justify not buying at the deadline, even if it’s a minor add to the bottom-six or blue line.

Every Stanley Cup-winning team has made moves ahead or at the trade deadline, and not all were mega-blockbuster deals. Often, the low-key additions are the ones that help propel a team further into the playoffs and eventually win the ultimate prize.

However, TSN released the latest version of their Trade Bait board for the trade deadline this season. Although there are a lot of names on this list who are playing on rebuilding or re-tooling teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs have one player who made the list, and it shouldn’t surprise many who that player is.

22-year-old Nick Robertson, who has had an up-and-down pro career thus far, has made TSN’s Trade Bait board at number 40. Whether the youngster gets dealt ahead or at the trade deadline remains to be seen, but his name popping up on a list like this shouldn’t come as a surprise given how his career has shaped out so far in Toronto and the constant healthy scratches this season.

Fortunately for Robertson, he has played in the last three games for Toronto and continues to impress in limited action. In just 29 games, the Pasadena native has seven goals and seven assists for 14 points, averaging just under 11 minutes of ice time a night (10:57).

He is in the last year of his ELC deal and is slated to be an RFA at the season’s end, with a qualifying offer of $813,750. As mentioned above, it’s unknown whether Brad Treliving and company will end up dealing the young player to a different team ahead or at the trade deadline and although most of the fan base would not accept trading him so early into his career… if a trade presents itself to help improve Toronto, not only immediately but in the future as well, they most certainly need to entertain the idea of trading him away.

With Robertson listed at number 40 on the TSN Trade Bait board, it probably suggests that nothing is imminent regarding trade rumours around him. That, and the fact that TSN might’ve just thrown his name inside the top 40 because he’s a Toronto Maple Leafs player, and it drives clicks.

(Stats from hockey-reference.com)