The Toronto Maple Leafs don’t have a lot going for them at the moment. A 0.6% chance of making the playoffs (as of Thursday morning), no 2026 draft picks in the first and second round, and one of the oldest lineups in the league doesn’t bode well. The Maple Leafs shouldn’t just be trade deadline sellers, they should be incredibly active trade deadline sellers and one of the best ways to be active trade deadline sellers is to weaponize their cap space.

As of today, the Maple Leafs have a lot of flexibility at the trade deadline to take back salary or to retain salary. A big part of this is Chris Tanev being on the Season Ending Long Term Injured Reserve. This seemed somewhat uncertain last week by the fact that Chris Tanev has been skating and a possibility he would return this season but Tanev’s return being set for 2026-27 now ensures that the Maple Leafs will have that money to burn.

Given that the Maple Leafs will be sellers there will be a money out aspect to most transactions as well that certainly cuts into the how much of the space the Leafs presently have and frees them up to accomplish a lot here. As things sit with Chris Tanev on the LTIR, the Leafs have $4.78M in cap space now, $5.07M in space on deadline day according to PuckPedia.

That is straight forward amount of money. The Leafs have 23 active players on the roster now and that means three players can be sent down temporarily to create additional space too. Easton Cowan not requiring waivers means he’ll be a paperwork shuffle at some point, Philippe Myers would be an easy player to get through waivers, and potentially someone like Dakota Joshua who runs little risk of being claimed gives the Maple Leafs anywhere from Cowan’s $873k of additional space up to around another $2.88M of space if the Leafs minimize their roster in advance of the trade deadline giving the team close to $8M total to work with as flexibility to optimize returns on their transactions.

At the very least the cap space matters in regard to the three salary retention slots the Maple Leafs have at their disposal. Players like Scott Laughton, Bobby McMann, Matt Benning, Calle Jarnkrok, Matias Maccelli, Troy Stecher, Henry Thrun, and Nick Robertson can all be dealt with salary retained and thanks to those players being free agents, they won’t be dead cap space for the Maple Leafs next season.

That doesn’t mean that the Leafs can’t retain on players like Max Domi, Dakota Joshua, Nic Roy, or Oliver Ekman-Larsson. It just means there needs to be a lot more incentive involved in doing that. The Leafs should be open to it given their situation and rising salary cap, but it feels a lot less likely. What seems most likely in this situation is that the Maple Leafs use their cap space by taking back bad contracts (examples around the league would include Andrew Mangiapane, Justin Holl, Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Ryan Graves, and Ryan Strome). Whether it is strictly dumping salary or as part of a deal for a Leafs player, there is also a lottery ticket aspect in these reclamation project players who just might not be clicking with their current coach. These reclamations might be more useful than players the Leafs might actually be seeking out in the off-season.

Whether it is the $4.78M the Maple Leafs have available today or the maxed out $8M of cap space the Maple Leafs could work with on deadline day one of the signs of the Maple Leafs coming up short at the trade deadline would be the club having cap space available on March 7th.

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