The Maple Leafs’ Fourth-Line Battle Shows Team Depth

At the Toronto Maple Leafs training camp, everybody is talking about Joshua, Blueger, Duhaime and Lorentz as though somebody has to lose. And, of course, somebody does. That's how training camp works. But I keep coming back to a slightly different way of looking at it.

Maybe the interesting part isn't which one of these players gets the last job. Maybe it's that Toronto has four players with legitimate reasons to think they belong in the NHL lineup. And that’s a big difference from last season's team.

Toronto Finally Has Some Real Depth.

For a long time, one complaint about the Maple Leafs was that there wasn't enough competition underneath the big names. The top players got plenty of attention, but once you moved down the lineup, questions often came up. Who could handle the defensive work? Who could play physically? Who could be trusted when a game got ugly? Who could give the team something when the scoring wasn't there?

This camp feels a little different. Joshua brings size and physicality. Blueger brings experience and defensive responsibility. Duhaime gives Toronto another big, hard player who can make life uncomfortable for opponents. Lorentz has shown he can be trusted in a variety of situations.

None of these players is being asked to carry the team. That's not what a fourth-line player does. But that's exactly why the competition is interesting. Toronto doesn't need somebody to become a star. It needs somebody who can do his job consistently, accept his role and make the coach comfortable putting him on the ice when the game gets difficult.

Somebody Good Is Going to Be Left Out of the Maple Leafs’ Lineup.

That's the part that gets lost when we talk about roster battles. A player can have a good camp and still not make the team. That isn't necessarily a failure. Sometimes it's simply the result of having more NHL-calibre players than available jobs. And that's a much healthier problem for a team to have than searching for somebody who can fill a spot because nobody else can.

The other thing to remember is that the season is long. Injuries will happen. Lineups will change. Somebody will get a chance that he didn't have on opening night. The player who doesn't make the original lineup isn't necessarily finished with the Maple Leafs.

So perhaps the real story here isn't Joshua versus Lorentz or Duhaime versus Blueger. It's that John Chayka has created enough competition that a pretty good hockey player will be disappointed when the roster is announced. For a team trying to build something deeper and tougher, that's not a bad place to start.