Teddy Blueger’s next stop is Toronto.
The Maple Leafs have added the former Vancouver Canucks centre on a two-year deal worth a $2.25 million AAV, bringing in a 31-year-old left-shot pivot who carved out a valuable role in Vancouver’s bottom six.
Blueger arrived in Vancouver on a one-year, $1.9 million contract in July 2024 and quickly settled into a third-line job alongside Dakota Joshua and Conor Garland. That trio ended up as one of the league’s better third lines, and Blueger did his part with six goals and 22 assists for 28 points in 68 games, matching his career high.
Vancouver brought him back on a two-year, $1.8 million AAV deal, but the 2025-26 season was a tougher grind. Injuries limited him to 35 games, yet he produced more efficiently than ever before.
Blueger finished with nine goals and 17 points, a pace that projected to 21 goals and 40 points over 82 games, which would have blown past his previous best. He also took on a bigger workload for Adam Foote, logging 16:31 per night, the highest ice time of his career.
The Canucks explored their options on Blueger at the trade deadline but never found a taker. The Jim Rutherford and Patrik Allvin regime still had interest in keeping him, drawn to the leadership and accountability he brought to the group. Blueger made that part of his value clear in February after a 5-2 loss to the Vegas Golden Knights, telling Sportsnet’s Iain MacIntyre:
“We’re not playing for nothing,” Blueger told MacIntyre. “You’ve got to have some respect and appreciation to be in this league, some respect for your teammates to play hard every night regardless of the standings.
The whole idea of, like, tanking and building for the future. . . when you play meaningless games like this, no one’s learning anything… You’ve got to dig in, try to compete and win every game. And we can’t get deflated and just stop playing when things aren’t going our way.
I think we’ve got to find some character in our group. I know we have some good guys that want to win and know how to win and to compete and play hard, but I think we’ve got to find it as a team.
Just find, you know, probably some more respect for each other, some appreciation to be in this league (and) not take that for granted, not just go through the motions because we’re last in the league. You know, come in and compete.
“I mean, I’m kind of sick of talking about it. You know, we probably don’t have enough character as a group to dig in in those moments, and we just kind of get deflated too easily.
No one can change that except for us. So we’ve got to take some more responsibility, more accountability. . . for each other, you know, just play hard for each other.
We’re not really doing that consistently enough. And when we go against a team that knows how to win, it’s even more difficult.”
Toronto’s move for Blueger comes amid a busy day of free-agent business. He joins Colton Sissons, Jack Roslovic, Brandon Duhaime, and Sergei Bobrovsky as signings the Maple Leafs have made today, and he’ll be in the mix for a bottom-six centre role behind Auston Matthews and John Tavares.
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