Quick Shifts: Where should Maple Leafs look for defence trade?

A quick mix of the things we gleaned from the week of hockey, serious and less so, and rolling four lines deep. No stranger to riding the pine.

1. Lost in the hullabaloo over his half-game benching of the future face of the Toronto Maple Leafs was how head coach Jim Hiller answered another question about his hockey team Thursday.

With fragile stabilizer Chris Tanev sidelined indefinitely, does Hiller believe the Leafs need to trade for a defenceman?

“Not my job, first of all,” Hiller replied. “And I think there’s always a lot of noise about something, so I’m not going to pay too much attention to it right now.”

What the coach did not say was some version of this: “No. We trust the blue line we have. We can outscore our problems and fix this internally.”

Hiller dipsy-doodled around a harsh reality, which is that — perhaps even with a speedy and sustained Tanev recovery — the Maple Leafs don’t roll out a strong and fast enough defence corps to win a playoff series, if they can get into one.

No doubt, Tanev’s absence is glaring. “He’s an elite shutdown defenceman, and he’s a leader in the locker room too,” said No. 1 goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, back to stopping pucks in a hairy environment. “So, it’s a big loss for us, definitely.”

Without him, Jake McCabe isn’t quite as effective. Darren Raddysh got leaned on for 27-plus minutes. And hard as they try, Troy Stecher, Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Nick Blankenburg are being asked to do too much.

Internal solutions are imperfect. Marshall Rifai looked a tad shaky in his season debut. An AHL veteran like Dakota Mermis or Philippe Myers could pop up and eat a few minutes. We’d like to see Ben Danford get a peek before more drastic measures are taken.

But the truth is, Toronto went into this season playing its best six D-men and, outside of the winless Flyers (23), no Eastern Conference team has given up more goals 5-on-5 than Toronto’s 22. The Leafs have blown a lead in each of their five losses.

Hiller will, correctly, point out that the forwards need to take some ownership of that as well. But he’s working with literally the oldest blue line in hockey, and they’re getting toasted off the rush.

Proactive GM John Chayka has already cleared a roster spot just in case an intriguing defenceman hit waivers. That’s smart.

But a real hockey trade for one of the serviceable names that might be available — Zach Whitecloud? Rasmus Ristolainen? Carson Soucy? Brenden Dillon? Nick Perbix? — requires real assets.

A more likely difference-maker like RFA Simon Edvinsson or RFA Alexander Nikishin requires an even better package, plus tens of millions of dollars in contract commitment.