Leafs have clarity on state of blueline with Chris Tanev update

The Toronto Maple Leafs have been plagued by a brutal run of injury luck all season long, and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.

Head coach Craig Berube told reporters this weekend that defenseman Chris Tanev is “going to miss some time, significant time.” The 36-year-old veteran is a physical, stabilizing presence on the backend, and his absence has been notable. Tanev also missed a lengthy stretch with a separate upper-body injury earlier in the season.

As Toronto finds itself facing an uphill battle to qualify for the Stanley Cup Playoffs, general manager Brad Treliving will need to find a way to improve a defensive situation that has the Leafs allowing 3.34 goals against per game, 27th in the NHL.

On Monday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, host Tyler Yaremchuk and co-host and NHL insider David Pagnotta discussed the update on Tanev’s status and how it affects Toronto’s defensive unit moving forward.

Tyler Yaremchuk: Let’s jump into that story you broke about Chris Tanev likely being done for the regular season. There’s no positives to this, the Leafs want him back on the blue line, he obviously wants to be playing hockey. But is maybe the silver lining here that the Leafs have answers now?

David Pagnotta: Yeah. And this is a big thing that he’s been battling a couple different things. Earlier on in the season he missed a lot of time for a separate injury than the groin injury that he had just picked up. The team announced it last week that he’s been battling a groin injury as his latest one. It’s nice to have some type of clarity in this situation… He’s going to meet with a surgeon this week to determine what the next steps are. It’s likely to go in the direction of surgery for what’s ailing him right now, and if that’s the case, it’s end of April, beginning of May as kind of that timeline, which presumably puts him on LTIR for the reset of the season and gives the Leafs a little bit of cap flexibility… whether they want to juggle their own guys or go out in the trade market and utilize up to $3.8 million in cap space.

You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…