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Henry Thrun has suddenly appeared on the Leafs like an unexpected half-brother on a soap opera. How’s he going to fit into the family?

Henry Thrun
Vitals

Age as of July 1
24.3

Position
D

Height
6’2″

Weight (lbs)
210

Shoots
L

Draft Year
2019

Draft Number
101

We’re going to have to start back at the beginning to get to know him. He was drafted in the fourth round in 2019. The Leafs had traded their first-round pick that year to get Jake Muzzin, so they drafted Nick Robertson in the second round, Mikko Kokkonen in the third and Mikhail Abramov and Nick Abruzzese in the fourth – after Thrun was taken by the Ducks three places after Matias Maccelli was taken by Arizona.

Thrun, Maccielli and Jordan Spence, a defender in the Kings organization drafted 95th, have more NHL games played than most of the third-rounders that year. What that teaches us is two things: players drafted to bad teams have pathways to pro hockey, and guessing at the future ability of a teenager is not an exact science.

Thrun is from Southborough, Massachusetts a small town near Boston, and he attended the prep school in his hometown. By the time he was drafted, he was playing for the US National Team Development Program. He was also a member of Team USA at the U18 tournament that year. He went to Harvard for a year in 2019-2020, and since Harvard cancelled the hockey season in the following year due to Covid, he went to the USHL for the season. He also made Team USA for the WJC. He returned to Harvard for two more years before he made his debut with the San Jose Sharks in the spring of 2023. He played for Team USA at the Men’s World Championships that year.

The Sharks?

The Sharks acquired him for a third-round pick from Anaheim in March 2023. They set out to get him, it wasn’t part of another deal, so they saw a defender who could play in the NHL at a time they were trying to tank and rebuild at the same time. They signed him right away to a fairly lucrative ELC for a guy with his track record. It included some performance bonuses and had a salary of $900,000. Not only that it was signed to burn the first year, allowing him to play in the NHL right away.

In 2024, the Sharks re-signed Thrun to two years at an AAV of $1 million. They traded him to the Leafs for Ryan Reaves this past July.

The Leafs would have been aware of what they were getting, although it’s hard to know if they just took him as a token in return for a contract dump or not. When Thrun first joined Harvard’s team out of the draft, Nick Abruzzese was their top scorer in his rookie season, so the Leafs scouts were there, paying attention to their prospect. Marshall Rifai was also there on the D corps.

By the time play resumed at Harvard in 2021, Abruzzese was second in points, and Thrun was third. Obviously he was a top-pairing guy on that team.

His first season in San Jose, he played 51 NHL games and 18 AHL games. Last season, he was full time on the NHL team, although he missed time to injury.

The Player

This is an excellent summation of his season:

2025 player review Henry Thrun: Slowing down in development

24-year-old Henry Thrun has finished his second season with the San Jose Sharks and while it was not a complete season because of injury, he still managed to play a total of 60 games with the Sharks.

In brief: he played limited PK time, no power play, and was paired with Cody Ceci and Jan Rutta most of the time at five-on-five. He has been used primarily as a defensive defender in the NHL and the results are not great.

Well. The Sharks, though.

As we learned with Simon Benoit’s first Leafs season, results on a team in the Ducks/Sharks region of the NHL are hard to translate to an NHL team that actually tries to win. For one thing, if Thrun even makes the Leafs and isn’t sent to the AHL, and if he then actually gets out of the pressbox and plays, he’s not getting 17 minutes a night. On the other hand, he won’t be facing a lot of top forwards either.

Realistically, given his profile, he’s going to enter training camp contesting with Phil Myers and Benoit to keep a third pairing or seventh defender job and not get whisked through waivers. His primary value right now is that he’s a goad to Benoit to not repeat last season’s massive downturn in defensive performance.

There is every possibility, given his NHL history and his physical size, that he ends up wafting off somewhere else on waivers. His best case might be the pressbox.

He’s not going without a fight though because he has understood that a defensive role is his key to success for a long time:

Henry Thrun Has Always Been Mature Beyond His Years

12-year-old Henry Thrun sounds a lot like the 23-year-old version. “At the age of 12, my job was done. He took full ownership. He wanted to be hockey player, and that’s all he wanted to do,” Henry’s dad Dave Thrun, who coached Henry until he was 12, told San Jose Hockey Now. “He […]

“He’s skilled. He’s not the most skilled. But he’s smart and he’s really passionate,” Dave Thrun said. “He’s never tried to overextend himself to do more than what he should do. He understands his game really well, where he fits in and where he needs to develop and grow.”The Votes

Thrun, almost 25, NHL playable, but not NHL valuable. For most voters that put him just in the top 10 of eligible T25 players.

For me, I dithered over ranking him below Victor Johansson, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that. No other Leafs defensive prospect we’ve ranked so far has a valid claim to be higher than Thrun, however.

Voter
Vote

Cathy
9

Brigstew
8

Species
9

Hardev
8

shinson93
9

Cameron
9

Zone Entry
11

Svalbard38
9

dhammm
5

adam
8

Weighted Average
8.5

Highest Vote
5

Lowest Vote
11

The votes were pretty tight around eight and nine, with one high vote and one low vote.

The Opinions

Brigstew: He’s capable of eating minutes for a really bad NHL team with a really weak defense. I knew of him back in his NCAA days because he was teammates on Harvard with Abruzzese, Fusco (for one year), and Miller. He has a bit of size, he’s a good skater, he moved the puck well in college at least. I gather that since joining the NHL he’s had a rougher go of things, but he’s already played nearly 120 NHL games. He may wind up as an NHL/AHL tweener that Toronto signs for cheap as waiver depth every year, or he could wind up being a sneaky-clever pick up if it turns out he has legitimate ability but just wasn’t good enough to elevate the pairing while with Jan Rutta, Cody Ceci, Calen Addison, or the rotting corpse of Marc-Edouard Vlasic behind a mix of very young and/or poor defensive forwards.

Shinson93:  He’s already set his floor as an NHL player for a bottom dweller.  The question is whether he’s a good player on a bad team, or a player that makes his team bad.  Watching him with Harvard, he was a puck mover that, as captain, seemed to always be on the ice.  He has the size to play at the NHL level, but hasn’t seemed to find his game yet.  I would love for him to take a step like Seth Jones, unshackled from poor teams.  Or is he that tweener guy that hangs around the AHL waiting for another opportunity.  I don’t want to get too attached, as I think this is our depth D guy that doesn’t make it through waivers.

dhammm: Resumes matter, even in the NHL, and the fact that Thrun got playing time on an awful team should still help him secure future employment, similar to how Simon Benoit’s hideous results when overplayed on a dreadful Anaheim Ducks team still secured him a one-year deal with the Leafs he would later make good on. Now, Benoit’s physical play and PK opens him up to more jobs around the league than Thrun’s puckmoving attributes, although Thrun’s size should help convince more GMs he’s worth a shot than the Calen Addisons, Victor Metes, and Erik Brännström that wash out from the league year over year. The future where Thrun is an everyday NHLer is more fathomable to me than most, even if his story with Leafs specifically will most likely be training-camp-attendee who gets lost on waivers.

Zone Entry:

Henry Thrun
Henry Thrun
Is he awful or is he fun?
San Jose
Was the pits
Can he give us some decent shifts?

HERE COMES

Mystery Henry Thrun

Svalbard38: Thrun feels pretty locked in as the 7D this season. He’s gonna get in some games because of injuries or because guys get scratched for a game. He might be a Benoit, who comes in with little expectation but carves out a real role for himself, he might be a Lagesson who puts in his time and is what we expect him to be, or he might be an AHL guy who we only ever remember as “the guy we got for Reaves”. I think the Lagesson path is most likely for him, but I’m very open to being proven wrong if Thrun wants to have a Benoit-esque tenure.

Your turn now: How many Leafs games do you think Thrun actually plays?

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