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2025-26 Toronto Maple Leafs General Discussion

I am hoping for this:

4. From a deployment standpoint, I think the biggest thing I’d like to see is the Leafs using Roy to free up Auston Matthews more. Matthews will naturally play a bunch against Nick Suzuki on Wednesday night — and rightfully so — but at home, Berube should be able to turn matchups inside out whenever he pleases.

Matthews finished with the second-lowest offensive-zone faceoff percentage of his career last season, and the team needs more from him offensively. They’ve added to their depth to make themselves more well-rounded. The biggest benefit is freeing up Matthews to provide more offensively, which they need him to do. Let’s see it happen now.
 
Frankie Corrado, on the Leaf Report podcast (Oct 3) on Easton Cowan potentially making the Opening Night roster and starting the season with the Leafs, despite the asset management risk
I would guess there's someone in the organization, and maybe it's on the coaching staff, that looks at it and says, we probably know at some point he's going to go to the minors, or we think there's a pretty good chance he goes to the minors.

But I don't want him to go without seeing regular season hockey and how its different and how these guys kind of act on the day to day. Like, how do you recover after a loss? How do you recover after a win? How do you get ready for a big Saturday night game? Like all these types of things. I think maybe starting on the fourth line, you're like, okay, we're just going to give him a little bit of time here.

He's going to play a little bit. He's going to see exactly what it's like. He'll take that down with him. And when he's ready and we're ready, we'll call him back up. But I think he's such an important player to their organization, they probably want to expose him to something like that before you make the decision.
Click to expand...

This was sort of what I wanted them to do last season, to send Cowan back to the OHL with this experience, but he just had a soft, soft camp compared to this time around.
 
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