If the NHL does move ahead with expansion for the 2027-28 season, the Toronto Maple Leafs could be staring at a familiar kind of headache: losing a promising young player before he ever really becomes a fixture.
The league is reportedly exploring expansion options that could land in Auston or Houston, Texas, or even bring Atlanta back for a third try. The location is one thing. The real issue for Toronto is what happens when a new franchise gets to pick one player from each existing team in an Expansion Draft.
That setup is nothing new. The Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken went through the same kind of process, and a mock draft from The Athletic took a swing at what the 33rd team might look like if expansion happened soon.
For the Leafs, the protection picture was fairly simple in that exercise. Under the old expansion format, teams can either protect seven forwards, three defensemen and a goalie, or eight skaters and a goalie. Toronto was projected to go with the eight-skater route, and the list they came up with was Auston Matthews, William Nylander, John Tavares, Matthew Knies, Darren Raddysh, Jake McCabe, Chris Tanev and Emil Andrae, with Sergei Bobrovsky as the goaltender.
The logic there is straightforward enough: if expansion came in 2027-28, players who have just finished their first or second pro season would be exempt anyway. That would include forwards like Easton Cowan and Gavin McKenna, so Toronto wouldn’t need to burn protection spots on them. In that kind of setup, the question becomes whether there’s anyone else worth shielding over a player such as Andrae or Tanev.
In The Athletic’s mock, the answer was no.
The player they had the new team taking from Toronto was Artur Akhtyamov. Among the Leafs’ available options, the young goalie stood out, and the reasoning was pretty clear.
The Athletic noted, “To round things out, we needed some organizational depth. After some lights-out play for the Calder Trophy-winning Toronto Marlies - and thanks to a very weak crop of other options - Artur Akhtyamov felt like an easy choice to make,” they wrote.
That selection fits the profile. Akhtyamov is coming off a Calder Trophy win, and in 22 playoff games he posted a 2.22 goals against average and a .923 save percentage. He is projected to begin next season with the Marlies again, which would be his third straight season there, but he also got into three NHL games last season and could be in line for more.
For now, he looks like exactly the kind of young goalie a new franchise would want to grab: high ceiling, still developing, and already showing enough to make him an attractive piece in a mock expansion setup.
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