We are less than five weeks from the trade deadline. It feels like we are at least halfway through the nonsense that starts around the beginning of the calendar year and so far has yielded just a Ryan Merkley/Matt Nieto trade. It’s an interesting time that never lives up to the hype that goes into it, but the trade deadline is the last barrier between Leafs fans and confronting the existential dread that is playoff time, so admittedly I try to enjoy it even knowing that it will be underwhelming.
There are a lot of quantitative elements that go into the trade deadline and throwing mass quantities of numbers at you about random players on random lottery teams is fun, but today I thought I’d just ramble on about 10 qualitative things that warrant a bit of discussion heading into the trade deadline as well.
1. If a player’s numbers say they are playing badly, trust the numbers
There is always a belief that the player that you want the Leafs to acquire who is having a down year is having that down year because they are playing on a bad team. There is one major flaw in this way of thinking and that’s the obvious, “what if the player I like i …

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Author: Jon Steitzer / The Leafs Nation