Should the Leafs use Nick Robertson as a sweetener to offload Matt Murray’s contract in a trade?: Leafs Morning Take

Hands up if you thought there would be some clarity to the Leafs goaltending situation by now.

Me too.

Well, at the very least, there have been some developments this week. On Wednesday, Ilya Samsonov filed for salary arbitration, and by doing so, it activated a second buyout window for the Leafs. Any way you slice it, for all intents and purposes, Matt Murray has played his final game as a Toronto Maple Leaf. He’ll either be traded, or as mentioned, he’ll be bought out.

At any rate, as part of Leafs Morning Take’s summer programming, Jay Rosehill and I got together to discuss a few things. We started with Matt Murray. The 29-year-old has a cap hit of $4.69 million for next season. It will be fascinating to see what happens here.

 

Meantime, by all accounts, it doesn’t like Brad Treliving and company are done adding to this Maple Leafs roster. In conjunction with one of my recent TLN articles, we discussed some potential defensive defenceman trade options. It sounds like they want to beef up on the blue line, which in my opinion, is a great call. Effectively, they’re looking for a Luke Schenn replacement.

 

Furthermore, incredibly, Rosey and I got a chance to spend some time with Wayne Gretzky. Our interview with The Great One will drop on Monday on YouTube and wherever you find your podcasts. We talked everything from Toronto’s offseason adds to the Auston Matthews/William Nylander situations to even some golf. He was a lot of fun.

In case you missed it, we’re scaling down our programming for the next few months before we return in earnest to set up the 2023-24 regular season. That said, if something happens, rest assured, we’ll be all over it.