31 Worst Toronto Maple Leafs Trades Ever

For our list of the Top 25 Best Trades in Toronto Maple Leafs History, we used Hockey Reference’s Point Shares, an attempt to value a player’s contribution to team points won. (You can read about it at in the Top 25 list.)

The cut off for that list 22 net Point Shares, though we included some honourable mentions at just over 20 net Point Shares.

Because, by net Point Shares, there have been a few more bad trades in Leafs history than good ones, this list is longer.

All Point Share data as of March 11, 2020

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Reevaluating the Hart Part 6: The Dead Puck Era

In Part 6 of our Hart Trophy series, we examine the Hart Trophies awarded between the strikes of 1995 and 2004, much of which is colloquially known as “The Dead Puck Era” due to the low scoring of the late ’90s and early ’00s

Listen here:

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The 25 Best Trades in Toronto Maple Leafs History

This list is an attempt at a semi-objective ranking of best trades made by the Toronto Maple Leafs. It makes use of Hockey Reference’s Point Shares metric to rank the trades.

A Point Share is a player’s share of the points his team earns in the regular season. (There are numerous problems with Point Shares, some of which we have listed at the end of this list.)

In order to rank the trades we took the total Point Shares players acquired by the Leafs accumulated for the Leafs and then subtracted the Point Shares the players sent out from the Leafs accumulated for the other team in the trade. We included all trades since the franchise came into existence but please let us know if we missed any.

We did this calculation for only the franchises involved in the trade so Point Shares accumulated for other franchises later on in the career, or if a player returned to the team later, do not count. (Again, the problems with this approach are discussed at the end.)

By our estimation the Leafs have given up way more in regular season Point Shares than they’ve ever received in return. (Though they’ve made a lot of money!) We estimate that, through trades and the waiver wire, the Leafs have given up over 820 Point Shares more than they’ve received. Gretzky is the career leader in Point Shares at 251. So, basically, the Leafs have given up over 3 Gretzkys in terms of regular season wins over the course of the last 100 years.

So the list of best 25 trades is a bit of stretch. It was a lot easier to find the bad ones.

Here they are: the 25 best trades in Leafs history ranked by Point Shares.

All Point Share data as of December 30, 2019

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Reevaluating the Hart Part 3: Original Six Hart Trophies

In Part 3 of our series, we tackle the NHL’s most famous era, the Original Six, and the MVP trophies awarded therein. There are a few here that are absolutely outrageous.

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The Top Inflated Outlier Seasons: Historical Context and the Meaning of 50 Goals/100 Points

Hockey fans have a thing for nice big round numbers when they rate accomplishments, the most famous of which is “50 goals in 50 games.” The problem is that scoring rates have varied drastically across time, most notably in the period from the NHL-WHA merger to the strike of 1994-95, when everything went crazy.

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