Trade Pitch Has Maple Leafs Acquiring Gritty $9 Million Forward From Sabres

The Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t made any additions to their forwards group but one trade pitch with the Buffalo Sabres changes that.

The website PuckPedia has a new tool called PuckGM that lets users create their own trades and one user proposed a deal that would see the Maple Leafs acquire Jordan Greenway from the Sabres.

Maple Leafs get:

• Jordan Greenway ($1.5 million retained)

Sabres get:

• Pontus Holmberg
• 2025 second-round pick (Florida’s)

The proposed deal does make sense as Toronto would add a gritty veteran forward in Greenway who can add some scoring to the bottom six, which has been an issue for the Maple Leafs. Buffalo would also retain $1.5 million of the $3 million that Greenway is owed as he’s entering the final year of his three-year $9 million deal.

Greenway has skated in 401 NHL games recording 52 goals and 99 assists for 151 points. Last season with Buffalo, he recorded 10 goals and 18 assists for 28 points in 67 games.

Holmberg, meanwhile, is 25 and fits the Sabres young core better and could have an increased role with Buffalo. He has one year left on his deal that pays him $800,000 while last season, the Swede recorded 7 goals and 10 assists for 17 points in 54 games.

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Maple Leafs GM Expects More Moves to Happen

Toronto has been quiet with moves since their big three additions of Chris Tanev, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, and Anthony Stolarz on July 1.

The Maple Leafs were one of the more intriguing teams entering the offseason, due to the possibility of trading Mitch Marner and John Tavares. However, that hasn’t happened but Maple Leafs general manager Brad Treliving isn’t ruling out the team making more moves before the start of the season.

“To me, we’ve still got five weeks or so till camp. And, you know, we’re not set yet. We continue to look at ways to make our team better,” Treliving said on OverDrive on TSN 1050. “I said at the end of the year we’re going to look at everything.  Sometimes people fall in love with ‘ ‘let’s make a big change just to make a big change’. At the end of the day, you can go out and make big changes. If they’re not making your team better, to me it doesn’t make any sense to just make a change just to stand up and say ‘look at it, we made this big change.'”

What moves Toronto may do is uncertain, but according to PuckPedia, the Maple Leafs have just over $1.2 million in cap space.

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Sabres GM Expects Team to Compete for a Playoff Spot

Buffalo has had an active offseason as the Sabres signed forwards Jason Zucker, Sam Lafferty, and Nicolas Aube-Kubel along with defenseman Dennis Gilbert in free agency while trading for Beck Malenstyn and Ryan McLeod.

The Sabres have not made the playoffs since the 2010-11 season, so GM Kevyn Adams believes Buffalo is now a harder team to play against.

“We had goals coming into this offseason [that] we were trying to achieve, and I think we’re a much better team today than we were a couple days ago,” Adams said.

“When you look at the offseason, kind of what we were looking to accomplish, we wanted to be harder to play against, we wanted to bring in more physicality, more identity kind of into that bottom six. We wanted to be a team that wears teams out, that can be relentless on the forecheck and hard, and we want to be a team that’s more responsible defensively,” Adams added.

Buffalo opens its 2024-25 NHL season on Oct. 4 against the New Jersey Devils.

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