NHL Trade Grades for Mitch Marner-Nic Roy Deal

Well, it happened.

Mitch Marner's Leafs Era ends not with a Stanley Cup, or, really, even dignity. Fans, management, and Marner's camp all feel let down by the other two groups.

He'll head to Vegas in a sign-and-trade, making an average of $12 million over eight years. Two narratives push against each other; the Golden Knights are one of the best-run teams in the NHL with a championship pedigree. Marner leaves Toronto with the reputation of someone who wilts under pressure and is not made for playoff hockey. Will a change of environment be the catalyst for a new career arc?

Where do the Leafs go from here? This trade is not only a massive loss of talent but signals a very uncertain new era for the organization. Will it be a blessing in disguise, or is this the official signal of a failed window of opportunity?

We break it all down in another edition of NHL Trade Grades.

Vegas Golden Knights

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Let's push aside the noise around Marner for a minute and conduct a face-value assessment of his hockey abilities. He's averaged 103 points over the last five seasons, collecting 450 points over 357 regular-season games. That ranks seventh among all NHLers and fourth among wingers. Marner is the best playmaking winger in the NHL.

He's also one of the best defensive wingers in the NHL. Some of that is an externality of his offensive abilities; the other team can't score if you have the puck in the offensive zone. But he is also quite good at helping his team build out from the defensive zone and anticipates plays well in defensive coverage..

Many will hammer Marner for his playoff performance and his role in the Leafs' catastrophic failures. He is not without fault, but much of the criticism and vitriol have been unfair. Much of the Leafs' lack of success can be pinned to terrible goaltending, costing them series they otherwise played well in. More specific to the 2025 playoffs, it was team depth that sank the ship. Marner's line was always forced into terrible matchups with defensive zone starts and still held its own while the Leafs' bottom six got crushed.

Plus, Vegas has a way with success. For one thing, it's nothing like Toronto, a hockey-crazy market. It was particularly claustrophobic for the Toronto native. There will be expectations in Vegas, but there will not be questions of his existential worth after every bad game. He'll be pretty under the radar in a place that has grown to love hockey but doesn't make the Golden Knights the center of its universe.

Let's also remember that similar narratives about lacking the gumption necessary for success are a narrative defined by Nazem Kadri and Phil Kessel following their similarly unceremonious exits from Toronto. Both, of course, then went on to become key contributors to Stanley Cup winners in Colorado and Pittsburgh, respectively.

I don't think Vegas fans should overthink this. They're getting a top-five winger in the NHL in his prime at a $12 million average cap hit — a number at which he should justify all eight years of his deal — and all it cost the team was a third-liner who wasn't long for the organization anyway.

Vegas won the Stanley Cup in 2023, but the last two seasons, they've been one critical piece away. Marner can be that piece.

Grade: A+

Toronto Maple Leafs

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How does one even begin to assess the impact of a trade like this for the Maple Leafs?

Let's start with the most granular analysis and take a look at Nic Roy, whom they acquired from Vegas. Roy is a 6'4" center who consistently pots 15 goals and hit a career-high 41 points in 2024. The 28-year-old has also been one of the more reliable defensive centers in the NHL over the last few years. He's a major asset both in terms of playing physically around the net, but also has the type of soft skills to make plays in the defensive zone to help his team get out of trouble.

Roy had a down year in 2024-25. Vegas' acquisition of Marner will likely push William Karlsson back to center, creating a crowded group and a need to move out salary. He is the victim of that circumstance, but he was integral to Vegas' 2023 Stanley Cup as a third-line shutdown center and he can fulfill that role in Toronto, thereby hopefully giving a break to Auston Matthews and John Tavares up the middle. At a $3 million cap hit for three seasons, he's a good player to have.

Of course, this move happens in a greater context. For one thing, the decision to move a first-round pick for center Scott Laughton at the 2025 trade deadline looked bad then and even worse now.

But really, this is all about Marner, the Leafs, and an extremely ugly divorce following a decade of high expectations. At the end of the day, they're moving a top-five NHL winger in a one-for-one exchange for a third liner and they have an upward climb to make up for that loss.

Perhaps it was time for both parties to move on, and, in a vacuum, getting a quality player like Roy in return for a player who was headed to market in less than 24 hours is nothing to gloss over. But Leafs fans are left with a million questions about how it ever even came to this.

Grade: C