NEWARK, N.J. — It was the morning before the Toronto Maple Leafs were hosting Mitch Marner for the first time in late January, and the team’s No. 1 power-play unit was squaring off against the No. 1 penalty-killing unit.
The power play, led by Auston Matthews, scored once and then again, moments later.
“That’s two, Laughty!” an exuberant Matthews, grinning widely, shouted in the face of top penalty killer Scott Laughton. “Two!”
It was a rare show of emotion from the Leafs captain, which seemed to speak to something essential about Laughton: the uplifting effect he’s had on the Leafs dressing room.
“He just blends the room together,” Matthew Knies said before the Leafs played the New Jersey Devils on Wednesday night, minus a soon-to-be-traded Laughton. “He came in, and I felt like he was on the team for years, and he just joined us. He just has the personality that everyone can connect with and relate to. He’s just fun to be around.”
Scott Laughton has made fans across the Leafs dressing room. (Bill Streicher / Imagn Images)
One year after the trade that brought him to Toronto (and on the eve of another one that will soon send him elsewhere), it’s clear Laughton turned out to be the right person for the Leafs, becoming one of the most popular and revered players in the dressing room in no time, but the wrong player in the wrong trade, too.
Easton Cowan, the Leafs’ youngest player, has sat close to Laughton in the Leafs dressing room all season. And all season, Laughton, with help from fellow seatmate Max Domi, has tried to impart wisdom on the 20-year-old forward.
Nothing major, just tips for handling all the little intricacies that come with playing in the NHL. How to prepare the body, for instance, so it can withstand the 82-game grind. One day, I walked into the dressing room to find Laughton and Domi playfully pestering Cowan, ensuring he knew what time lunch was that day.
“I try to make them laugh,” Cowan said. Grinning, he added: “I mean, they’re both pretty scary when they get mad with me. But they’re both very happy guys, (and) obviously I’ve learned not to piss them off.”
They tell him about what it was like for them coming up in the NHL, in Laughton’s case as a 20-year-old with the Philadelphia Flyers. What their phones looked like back then. How little social media there was in those days.
“It’s just funny hearing different sides of our lives,” Cowan said.
Laughton remembers what it was like for him as a youngster with the Flyers, sitting beside and learning from Wayne Simmonds, Jakub Voracek, Sean Couturier, Claude Giroux and the late Ray Emery. “I sat beside JVR for a while in the practice rink,” added Laughton, referring to James van Riemsdyk, the former Leaf and Flyers forward.
Van Riemsdyk and Laughton happened to be texting that day about the Batman costume van Riemsdyk sported for his son’s birthday. They were still in touch.
“You can be pretty fired up in the room, so it’s nice to have a guy you sit beside and shoot the s— (with) and keep it light,” Laughton said. “I was sitting beside Cowboy in Long Island (in early January), and we had a great time. We both keep it light, so it’s good that way.”
“It brings me back to when I was 20,” Laughton continued. “And it’s like you’re so wide-eyed. You have no idea what’s going on.” It was “just the little stuff in the room” that he tried to impart on Cowan, even something as small as tidying up and helping out that way.
The problem with the trade had nothing to do with personality: Laughton wasn’t what the Leafs needed on the ice. And the cost to get him was substantial: a top-10-protected first-round pick in 2027 (that could become unprotected in 2028) and young forward Nikita Grebenkin, who has produced similar numbers to Laughton as a 22-year-old bottom-six forward with Philadelphia this season.
What the Leafs needed — and paid for — last March was a third-line centre to take over for Domi. But that wasn’t Laughton, who had spent most of the season to that point as a winger for the Flyers.
Craig Berube gave it only four games before he pulled the plug on Laughton as the 3C and pivoted back to Domi.
Laughton eventually became the fourth-line centre instead, which wouldn’t have been so bad if (a) the cost to acquire him wasn’t so high (and it’s not even clear how high at this point, given the uncertainty with the pick), and (b) the Leafs didn’t already have a fourth-line centre kicking around in David Kämpf. (Kämpf’s contract was later terminated in a messy exit from Toronto last fall.)
Laughton will end up playing just 76 games with the Leafs, including the playoffs last spring, when he struggled to make an impact.
Scott Laughton has scored eight goals and added four assists in 43 games this season. (Dan Hamilton / Imagn Images)
And though his value in the personality department has been unquestionably high, the Leafs will have gotten only meagre production out of the 31-year-old: a total of 10 goals and eight assists. That includes 13 playoff games in which Laughton was held without a goal and produced only two assists, playing around 14 minutes a night.
The trade was tough on Laughton initially. Even though he was coming home to Toronto, he was starting over with a new team after 12 seasons in Philadelphia.
His first trade in the NHL was harder than he thought it would be. “It was a big whirlwind,” Laughton recalled. “I was lucky to have family here and things like that. But my wife and son were still in Philly at the time.”
It’s probably no coincidence that Laughton’s play has ticked up a bit this season.
His biggest contribution was on the penalty kill, where he played a top role for one of the league’s top units. He thrived there, in part by winning a sizzling 63 percent of his faceoffs.
Berube called him one of the team’s “dependables,” someone he could trust to kill a penalty and defend a late lead.
Yet, Laughton still averaged under 14 minutes a game this season — the fewest for him personally in nearly a decade — and played almost exclusively on a fourth line that struggled to stand out. The Leafs won only 44 percent of the expected goals in his minutes.
In what may have been his final game as a Leaf earlier this week — against the Flyers, somewhat fittingly — he logged less than 12 minutes. Two nights later, he watched his soon-to-be former team play the Devils next to Oliver Ekman-Larsson from the press box, another trade on the horizon.
