One of the great internet hockey resources out there that doesn’t get utilized enough is NHL Injury Viz. There is a mountain of information that allows you better understand the health situations for both teams and individual players. In many ways the Leafs had an unfortunate 2023-24. Losing Marner for double digit games was difficult. The fact that the injuries on defence often overlapped each other, as well as the 35 game absence of Joseph Woll made things tougher than they needed to be in the regular season.

2023-24 wasn’t anything new for the Maple Leafs and really any team in the NHL. There’s going to be a ton of variance and while some players seem to be injury prone, no one is a lock for missing time. Nick Robertson had the label of being injury prone and was available for the 2023-24 season. The same good fortune could befall Conor Timmins or Joseph Woll who have been criticized in the same fashion.

Here is the breakdown of who missed time last year and then we’ll take a look at the games missed and what it means for the Maple Leafs need for depth.

This is the twice hardest hit area of concern for the Leafs heading into this season. While not wanting to attach an injury prone label to anyone, Matt Murray is in a different situation. He’s potentially working his way back from something that is career ending and he may not yet be ready for NHL work. There will also be questions of workload for him. Luckily he’s the third option, but his readiness to step in for Woll or Stolarz is uncertain.

Woll had a rough year last year and potentially with a partner that can share the net with him there will not be a need to overwork either goaltender and that’s going to create better health outcomes. Both netminders haven’t played the balance of an NHL season yet either because of injuries or because of primarily being viewed as a backup so avoiding one goaltender holding the net beyond three games in a row seems like an ideal strategy.

If depth is going to be tested, Dennis Hildeby is certainly worth taking a look at as well so the Maple Leafs benefit from a system that is more or less four goaltenders deep. That’s about as good as it gets.

In addition to the excessive time missed by Timmins and Liljegren last season, there was the John Klingberg situation that saw him shutdown for 67 games last season. There were a lot of injuries on the Leafs back end and more than the length of injuries, the issue came from overlap as the Leafs had to deal with multiple instances with three of their top six defencemen out of the lineup at a given time (four if you still include Klingberg as part of the top six.)

The Leafs need to come into the season with a plan for having ten defencemen in their system that they can trust and somewhat ironic to this article, the status of Jani Hakanpaa is still unknown.

Looking past Hakanpaa the Leafs have their seven NHL defencemen with Rielly, Tanev, McCabe, Liljegren, Ekman-Larsson, Benoit, and Timmins, but have their depth options in Mermis and Myers, and their untested youth in Webber, Kokkonen, and Niemela.

The 2023-24 season was fairly fortunate for the Leafs. The Marner absence was significant and potentially hindered him come playoff time, but other than that most of the time lost was in the bottom six part of the forward group with Jarnkrok and Reaves leading the way in games missed.

Looking at last year and even the preceding ones it might be easy to say, no problem, the Leafs have this, especially with Alex Nylander, Alex Steeves, and Nick Abruzzese being options beyond the roster that seem worthwhile in a supporting fashion.

The challenge for the Leafs forwards is more focused around two other critical areas. The Leafs centre depth cannot be challenged. There is already a steep drop off after Matthews and Tavares, and while Nylander, Domi, Jarnkrok, and potentially even Marner could be short term fixes, it is a position that can have an impact on the Leafs season.

As a continuation of that thought, if the Leafs suffer overlapping injuries to their core four forwards, it can make Toronto’s lineup look underwhelming pretty fast. The Leafs have navigated this in small doses over the time the core has been together but hasn’t dealt with longer term absences. This could be the biggest flaw in the top heavy roster model and the Leafs haven’t had to confront this with any regularity.

The mitigation here might be creating opportunities for Easton Cowan, Fraser Minten, Alex Nylander, and Nick Robertson to have them as impact options for the Leafs, ready to contribute in bigger roles if called upon.

The Oilers show that sometimes you can get lucky. Missing five games of Connor McDavid is never fun, but none of their top six forwards missed more than five games throughout the year and more astonishingly, their defence only missed four total games all season.

It would be nice to experience that, but the reality is most teams have to deal with adversity.

The Leafs just need to put themselves in the best place for dealing with that adversity and have the right types of depth in their organization.