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All-Time Top 10 Toronto Maple Leafs Players Ranked | LeoVegas

Toronto Maple Leafs Top 10 Players Ranking

Originally known as the Toronto Arenas when founded in 1917, the Toronto Maple Leafs have established themselves as one of the NHL's premier clubs. With 13 Stanley Cups in their trophy case, the team boasts a grand history of success that, despite not having hoisted the Cup since 1967, has been fuelled by a lineup of legendary players throughout the decades.

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In betting markets, the Buds are, once again, among the favourites for both the Eastern Conference and Stanley Cup. So, will their star players - who already rank among the franchise's top ten of all time - be able to take Toronto to heights unseen since the 1960s?

Here's how the top ten Toronto Maple Leafs players rank with the 2024/25 season underway. If a certain American centre and Ontario-born right wing can get their hands on the Cup, these rankings might just need a leafy adjustment.

1. Mats Sundin (C)

  • Position: Centre
  • Years Active: 18
  • Games Played: 1,346
  • Goals: 564
  • Assists: 785
  • Total Points: 1,349

For 12 of his 13 seasons with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Mats Sundin finished as the team’s leading scorer, consistently clocking in with at least 27 goals and 73 points. The Swede, who’d also break records for the longest-serving captain not of North American birth, was the epitome of consistency for the Buds.

Standing 6’5’’ and 240 lbs, he didn’t begin his massive NHL career with the Maple Leafs. Sundin was drafted first overall by the Québec Nordiques, immediately making good on his swift drafting. Over four seasons, he scored 334 points for the Nordiques, but became a legend after he was part of a blockbuster trade that brought him to Toronto.

2. Darryl Sittler (C)

  • Position: Centre
  • Years Active: 15
  • Games Played: 1,096
  • Goals: 484
  • Assists: 637
  • Total Points: 1,121

Arriving via the eighth overall pick in the 1970 NHL Entry Draft, Darryl Sittler was hoped to be one of the key pieces that’d reinstate the Maple Leafs as Stanley Cup champions again. While the team couldn’t quite reach those heights in Sittler’s career, the centre became an all-time great of the hockey club.

He opened with a fairly modest rookie campaign the season after he was drafted, scoring 18 points in 49 games. Sittler almost doubled that tally in 1971/72, but truly broke out the following year, hitting 29 goals and 77 points. After that, he went on an eight-season run of scoring at least 36 goals and 80 points.

3. Börje Salming (D)

  • Position: Defenceman
  • Years Active: 17
  • Games Played: 1,148
  • Goals: 150
  • Assists: 637
  • Total Points: 787

Left-shot defenceman Börje Salming was a trailblazer for European-born skaters in the NHL. With his number 21 now up in the rafters at Scotiabank Arena, he arrived as a free agent signing in time for the 1973/74 season, putting up four goals and 39 points.

Over his 16 seasons with the Buds, Salming would continue to stack points for the team, finishing with multiple franchise records to his name. As it stands, his tally of 620 assists is well above Sundin (567), Sittler (527), and it'll take Mitch Marner (500) a few more seasons to beat the bar set by the Swede.

4. Auston Matthews (C)

  • Position: Centre
  • Years Active: 9
  • Games Played: 602
  • Goals: 388
  • Assists: 306
  • Total Points: 694

Born in California, raised in Arizona, Auston Matthews made his way through the United States Hockey League before deciding to play his draft year in the Swiss National League with the ZSC Lions. This proved to be a superb choice, cementing the American centre as the consensus, potentially franchise-altering No. 1 ranked player in the 2016 draft.

Matthews played the full 82-game slate in his 2016/17 rookie season, scoring an absurd 40 goals and 69 points. His knack for scoring has been relentless ever since. Last season, he hit a new high of 69 goals and 107 points, beating his 2021/22 tally by one point.

While he’s been hampered a bit this season, only playing 40 of the first 55 games, Matthews has still been able to score 20 goals and 45 points – in keeping with his career average of over one point per game. When the sharpshooter is on the ice, the Maple Leafs are, more often than not, favoured on the NHL game moneyline.

5. Wendel Clark (LW)

  • Position: Left Wing

  • Years Active: 16

  • Games Played: 793

  • Goals: 330

  • Assists: 234

  • Total Points: 564

    Drafted first overall in the 1985 NHL Entry Draft, Wendel Clark just kept on coming back to try to further his legacy as one of the all-time great players of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Thrown straight into the NHL lines, Clark ended his rookie season leading the team with 227 penalty minutes and 34 goals.

    As much a steely-eyed goalscorer as he was a physical presence, he would stay with the Buds for nine seasons – a fair few of which were shortened. He moved to the Québec Nordiques in 1994, but returned to the Buds in the middle of the 1995 season. In 1998, he was in Tampa Bay, but returned for a final stint with Toronto in the back half of the 1999/00 season.

6. Mitch Marner (RW)

  • Position: Right Wing
  • Years Active: 9
  • Games Played: 630
  • Goals: 210
  • Assists: 500
  • Total Points: 710

In the ridiculously stacked 2015 class of Connor McDavid, Jack Eichel, Dylan Strome, Noah Hanifin, Zach Werenski, Mikko Rantanen, and Timo Meier, the Maple Leafs couldn’t go wrong with their fourth overall pick. As it turns out, they struck gold with right wing Mitch Marner, who landed in the NHL lines a year later(2016/17 season).

Marner made an immediate impact, scoring 61 points in 2016/17, 69 points in 2017/18, and then 94 points in 2018/19. While his 2023/24 season was mightily impressive with 85 points, his ceiling set the season before was just one point short of a century.

He commenced the 2024/25 season with 71 points in 54 games so far. With his points leading the Buds to that point, his defensive strengths – which include 39 takeaways to date and an average of 2:18 minutes of short-handed time per game – have firmly put the Ontario native in the Selke Trophy odds.

7. Doug Gilmour (C)

  • Position: Centre
  • Years Active: 20
  • Games Played: 1,474
  • Goals: 450
  • Assists: 964
  • Total Points: 1,414

Despite standing 5’10’’, Doug Gilmour was a superbly physical player, capable of outmuscling any of the giants roaming the 1980s and 90s NHL ice. He began with the St. Louis Blues for five seasons having been picked early in the seventh round of the 1982 draft.

In 1988/89, he went to the Calgary Flames, continuing to run up the hit marker and average over a point per game. By the 1991/92 season, Gilmour and the Flames front office were at odds, and while he continued to perform at an elite level on the ice, the team had to work out a trade eventually, finding a ten-player swing with Toronto to be the best option.

For the Maple Leafs, Gilmour hit a new high in his career. After netting 49 points in the remaining 40 games of the 1991/92 season, he scored 32 goals and 127 points, as well as 100 penalty minutes, in 1992/93. He’d score another 35 points in that post-season, but couldn’t quite pull the Buds past the Kings in the Conference Finals.

8. Rick Vaive (RW)

  • Position: Right Wing
  • Years Active: 13
  • Games Played: 876
  • Goals: 441
  • Assists: 347
  • Total Points: 788

Continuing a time-honoured tradition of trading in classy players and helping them to new heights, Rick Vaive was drafted fifth overall in 1979, put up 21 points in his first 47 games for the Vancouver Canucks, and was then traded in his rookie season. The Buds welcomed Vaive and set him up for success.

In the Ottawa-born right wing’s first full season, he scored 33 goals. In the next, he set a record that would hold for four decades. The 1981/82 campaign saw Vaive score 54 goals, which he followed up with tallies of 51 and 52 goals in the next two seasons. The prolific scorer ended his seven-and-a-half season run with the Buds on 299 goals in 461 games.

9. Lanny McDonald (RW)

  • Position: Right Wing
  • Years Active: 16
  • Games Played: 1,111
  • Goals: 500
  • Assists: 506
  • Total Points: 1,006

Sporting a glorious moustache throughout his career and into his retirement, Lanny King McDonald lived up to his middle name throughout his NHL career. The right wing’s ascendancy began with the Buds. Toronto picked the highly-rated playmaker fourth overall in 1973 and put him straight into the NHL lines.

After a couple of what would prove to be mediocre or warm-up seasons, McDonald exploded to score 37 goals and 93 points in 1975/76. Despite his relentless scoring, in the middle of his seventh season in Toronto, the team traded him to the Colorado Rockies, sparking protests outside of the Maple Leafs’ stadium.

10. Dave Keon (C)

  • Position: Centre
  • Years Active: 18
  • Games Played: 1,296
  • Goals: 396
  • Assists: 590
  • Total Points: 986

Dave Keon was a member of the Maple Leafs for 15 years, from 1960 to 1975. His career in Toronto just so happens to coincide with one of the team’s most successful periods. In 1962, 1963, 1964, and 1967, the Buds hoisted the Stanley Cup, with Keon being a consistent scorer in each, having won the Calder Trophy in 1961.

The centre from Québec never failed to score at least 45 points for the Toronto Maple Leafs, regularly put away over 20 goals each season, and invariably managed to hit that next gear in the post-season. He’d leave the Buds in 1975 but was coaxed back to NHL action in 1979 for three seasons by the Hartford Whalers.