The Leafs in Blue Have a Big Blueline

The Maple Leafs are really coming together in the image that Brian Burke has set out for it to be. Built from the back end out. Looking at the list of defensemen below, there is little doubt that there is still some more movement, especially after the signing of Francois Beauchemin over my holiday. That addition brings their total up to nine defenders, which leads to speculation that the player on his way out is Tomas Kaberle, to help ease the salary cap number. Omitted from the list, but should likely be there is the signing of Jonas Gustavsson, which was also done over my holiday, but I'm trying to capture all the players who have a sufficient number of games played last season. By training camp, Gustavsson should find his way onto the team list.

Forwards	Defense	Goaltenders
Jason Blake	Tomas Kaberle	Vesa Toskala
Alex Ponikarovsky	Ian White
Matt Stajan	Jeff Finger
Mikhail Grabovski	Luke Schenn
Lee Stempniak	Anton Stralman
Niklas Hagman	Mike Van Ryn
Nikolai Kulemin	Mike Komisarek
John Mitchell	Garnet Exelby
Jamal Mayers	Francois Beauchemin
Colton Orr

Thanks to a somewhat rag-tag set of forwards, the Leafs are not strapped for cap space, carrying 20 players on their current list at a rate of $47.4 million, which still leaves over $10 million to work with for three players. If you were to add Gustavsson to the mix, that number will escalate and would do even better if Kaberle was to end up leaving. The Leafs will be cost savvy and fairly competitive from the blueline out in 2010.

They haven't really solved their goal scoring problems, but with Tyler Bozak, Christian Hanson, Nazem Kadri, among others under contract as well, they will likely be showing off some good young talent to help those woes.

The Leafs will be a prime place to get some penalty minutes now as well, espeically with Colton Orr under contract. Orr is one of those big penalty minute guys and should add to his totals well in Toronto.