Domi Is Out Indefinitely, and Toronto Opens Camp With Five Players Already Sidelined

Max Domi will miss the start of training camp and has no clear return timeline, the team confirmed Friday. He joins Auston Matthews, Chris Tanev, Dakota Joshua, and Zack MacEwen on the sideline as Toronto opens camp — five players unavailable before a meaningful rep has been skated.

The Domi news is the smallest of the five names and the largest of the immediate concerns. Matthews is the one everyone is watching, but Domi's absence matters in a different way: he was a secondary center last season, posting 20 points in 46 games, and the forward depth behind the top line was already thin before camp started. When I wrote about the patchwork forward group after the Brisson signing, the assumption was that the depth pieces would at least be healthy. That assumption is now shakier.

Toronto remade a lot of this roster over the summer — Roslovic in, Robertson out, Brisson and Sissons added on one-year deals, Jarnkrok gone to Sweden. The intention was to build more flexibility into the bottom six. What the organization did not account for, or could not account for, is arriving at camp with this many bodies unavailable. The Leafs can still sort this out if the injured players return quickly, but "out indefinitely" is not a phrase that suggests quick.