It has been anything but a quiet week. The Leafs have hired a coach, found a top pairing defenceman (or at worst a top four defenceman), and made an important decision in net. They are sitting on about $18.8 million of cap space for future moves, are heading into the draft on Friday, with free agency on the horizon. The next two weeks will be all out before it likely goes dead quiet. If there is a benefit to hiring a GM that has been out of the NHL for as long as John Chayka has been, it’s that he doesn’t feel entitled to a summer break.

There are a lot of risks that come with Darren Raddysh. He’s a 30-year-old on an eight-year deal paying him $8.5M AAV. That’s already a risk.

He had a couple of solid seasons prior to it, but last year was his breakout top pairing calibre season on a deep team coached by Jon Cooper and with the forgiving goaltending of Andrei Vasilevskiy behind him. Whether he can repeat his level of success with the Leafs is risk two.

Risks are necessary. Playing it safe and running things back has wasted a decade for the Maple Leafs. This might be one hell of a gamble on Raddysh, but even when stripping away all the benefits of playing for Adams-winning coach on a top team, Raddysh has one of the heaviest point shots in the game, and that is something that has been absent from the Leafs’ blueline for a long time.

If you were to ask me before the sign and trade if Raddysh should have been a target for the Maple Leafs, I would have said no. Rasmus Andersson seems like the safer bet, and I like Mario Ferraro more than both Raddysh and Andersson. I don’t think my mind has changed, but I can at least appreciate the gamble on upside, even if I am confident last season was Raddysh’s career year.

There’s also something to be said about the hustle. John Chayka isn’t waiting on the league, and he is turning over the Maple Leafs while the rest of the league is busy sorting out their draft lists. If the Leafs can’t be good, they should at least be interesting, and Chayka’s delivering on that.

As for the long term nature of the deal, it will come down to how the bonuses and front-loading are structured, but if the wheels do come off for the Maple Leafs or if Raddysh can’t live up to his deal, it’s not such a huge contract that it couldn’t be escaped with a little salary retention.

If we can see that Anthony Stolarz has never played more than 34 games in the NHL as a 32-year-old, John Chayka is well aware of that too. He also has access to the Leafs doctors and trainers, who would make him the best informed person on how many games he can reasonably expect out of Stolarz next season.

It’s entirely possible that some combination of Stolarz, Dennis Hildeby, Artur Akhtyamov, and Samuel Ersson is the plan, but I’d also argue it might not be what the Leafs go with.

Is there a market for Stolarz? Is it beneficial to play Hildeby and Akhtyamov behind more of a workhorse rather than needing to rely too heavily on them?

It doesn’t seem unreasonable for the Maple Leafs to completely overhaul their net this offseason. Stolarz and Joseph Woll might have had a promising 2024-25, but there was nothing about them in 2025-26 that warrants loyalty from a new GM.

This is just a guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Leafs have a new 1A in net next season.

Doubling back to Raddysh for a minute, it’s worth noting that he’s not very fast. This was true of most of the Leafs last season, so it’s not a fault exclusive to him. It is something that the organization knew it needed to address and is one of the priorities thrown for a successful team identified by Jim Hiller.

Neither Emil Andrae nor Raddysh makes the defensive group any faster, but arguably, there is an even bigger need for speed up front anyway.

Who do the Maple Leafs look at to improve this?

Bobby McMann might be the best overall speedster in free agency, and it would be interesting to see if the Maple Leafs revisit him, knowing that far more than Bobby McMann is required to turn the Maple Leafs around.

Other options like Beck Malenstyn, Ryan Lomberg, and another ex-Leaf returnee option in Ilya Mikheyev could add speed to the bottom six forward group. This is arguably where the speed boost would help the Leafs the most, as speed is essential to pressuring puck carriers.

There are options out there, and they won’t break the bank. What will be interesting is how the Leafs make space for these players in their roster.