TSN: Chris Johnston on the Toronto Maple Leafs and their need for blue line help.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Reda: “Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Teams are always looking to bring in help for their D core. 12 of the 20 players on our (trade bait) list are defensemen. We know the Leafs need help. They’ve, they’d love to have a guy like Chris Tanev. What competition does Toronto have for him and other top D men are available?
Johnston: “Right now maybe there’s not a ton of competition. The Leafs are probably more motivated I’d say than the other teams that will likely join the defensive market as time goes along just because of the injuries.
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Toronto’s withstood on its blue line maybe some of the opportunities they have now with Klingberg being on long-term injured reserve, in terms of freeing up money that they could use to spend elsewhere. But as this goes along, I think the reason this, this trade probably doesn’t happen in the short-term for the Leafs is that the selling teams do have pretty high price tags on the sorts of players that they’d be looking at.
And the reason they do that is you got to take to give up that asset right now, you’ve got to get a lot back because as we get into January and February, I do think a lot of the contending teams with high ambitions like the Leafs have, will be in the same kind of marketplaces and there’s a hope that you get a bidding type of situation.
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So, you know, right now the Leafs might be the most aggressive team in trying to bring in short-term help, but as we go along here, I think there’ll be a lot of other competition around them.