Toronto Maple Leafs drop big hint that stars might not return next season

We can probably bet that the Toronto Maple Leafs' social media team doesn't exactly have the most fun job in the world right now.

On Thursday, the Leafs shared on their social media a few photos of the NHL Draft Combine in past years, posting throwbacks of star players like Auston Matthews, Morgan Rielly, and William Nylander, to name a few.

The team's Instagram carousel had 13 posts, highlighting pictures of the players in their pre-draft stage, with many comments pointing out how young the players looked in their early years.

But that wasn't the main takeaway for a lot of fans.

Two players who were conspicuously absent from the post were pending free agents Mitch Marner and John Tavares.

 

 

 

 

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Both Marner and Tavares were high-end draft picks in their own right, with Marner going fourth overall to Toronto in 2015 while Tavares was picked first in 2009 by the New York Islanders.

There's no hard-and-fast rule on whether you're allowed to post social media of players who could be leaving the team in the offseason, but it's clear that many fans are taking it as a sign of what the front office is thinking. Conversely, if a player not under contract is appearing in a lot of official posts from the team, it's probably a sign that a contract is just around the corner.

But it's probably a no-win situation for the social team – if the Leafs had posted a picture of either of them, it'd probably cause just as much speculation anyway.

Since a recap of their season-ending media availability on May 20, the Leafs have yet to post a single other photo on their Instagram feed involving a current roster player until the combine pics. It's not like they'd been overloading the page with Matthews and Nylander content and avoiding Marner and Tavares — they hadn't been posting much at all.

In any case, free agency opens a little over three weeks away on July 1, when we will have some more definitive answers about the future of the Leafs – and, hopefully, fewer social media deep dives.