Roman Polak, Nick Spaling Not Worth Price San Jose Paid in Trade with Toronto

The Toronto Maple Leafs continued the execution of their rebuilding plan on Monday. After previously sending away team captain Dion Phaneuf in a deal with Ottawa and then moving winger Shawn Matthias to Colorado in a trade Sunday, the Leafs connected with the San Jose Sharks on a transaction that saw two more veterans leave Toronto.

Raffi Torres has played all of 16 NHL games since joining the San Jose Sharks in 2012-13, as suspension and injury have made him a non-factor. He’s on an expiring contract and pointless in six AHL games, and the Leafs promptly assigned him to San Jose’s minor-league team. His $2 million cap hit is simply in this deal to make the money work.

The real return is two second-round picks. Considering the players that the Leafs gave up—more on them in a moment—this is a massive win for Toronto. Whether the team ultimately makes these selections or uses them as trade chips down the road, second-round picks have significant value to a rebuilding team.

The caveat is that none of those picks is from this summer’s draft. ESPN’s Craig Custance tweeted out that this was of great importance to San Jose Sharks general manager Doug Wilson:

Wilson’s right, but that doesn’t change the price he paid for two unremarkable veterans.

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Roman Polak is likely the key to this deal from a Sharks’ perspective. The 29-year-old right-shot defenceman spent most of his career in St. Louis, and he has now played 535 regular season games. He’s a warhorse, a 6'0", 237-pound defenceman who plays an abrasive physical game, blocks shots and kills penalties.

A paragraph from Mark Zwolinski’s story in the Toronto Star quotes Mike Babcock and offers a fair representation of what Polak brings to the rink:

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"He’s mean, he’s a man, he comes to play every night,” said Babcock, whose praise for Polak resonates even deeper in the wake of his reflection that the Leafs “will have a lot of competitive guys, we don’t have enough now."

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For all his defensive zone utility, Polak is, however, a limited player.

He played at least 90 minutes at five-on-five with five different partners in Toronto this year; in every single case the Corsi number posted by those players fell. That team-wide collapse strongly suggests that Polak isn’t especially good by NHL standards at keeping the puck in the offensive zone, which is a key skill in the playoffs. Those shortcomings will likely limit him to a third-pair role in San Jose.

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Versatile forward Nick Spaling, meanwhile, has just a single goal and seven points in 35 games with Toronto this season. He can play any forward position and has at points in his career played on both the power play and penalty kill (he had a major role in the latter in Toronto).

All that’s good, but the problem is that he’s just not a good enough player to be in a feature role.

Spaling’s five-on-five scoring has dwindled to a replacement-level rate this season. Over the past three years, he ranks 229th in points/hour among NHL forwards with at least 1,000 minutes played, which sounds like a reasonable third-line rate (30 players per team would make him an average third-liner) except that he’s spent quite a bit more time with good players over that span than we’d normally expect from a third-liner.

Like Polak, Spaling is one of those players who seems to have a detrimental effect on his line’s ability to keep the puck in the right end of the rink. His five most common linemates this season all had far better Corsi totals away from him than they did on his line.

Perhaps the most damning assessment of the Spaling portion of the trade is that Toronto moved a superior Shawn Matthias for a fourth-round selection just one day prior to this deal.

From a puck possession point of view, San Jose just paid two second-round picks to bring in two players who don’t really help keep the puck in the Sharks’ hands in the offensive zone. Even when we acknowledge the defensive-zone contributions of Polak and Spaling, it’s hard to make a case for either as more than a depth piece, with Spaling a third-/fourth-line ‘tweener and Polak a third-pairing defender.

Those aren’t the kind of reinforcements that warrant multiple second-picks as trade return.

Statistics courtesy of NHL.com and Stats.HockeyAnalysis.com. Salary information via General Fanager.

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.