When Tobias Lindberg stepped on the ice with the Toronto Maple Leafs against the Buffalo Sabres he was part of a team record that hasn’t been matched in almost 100 years.

Lindberg, one of the prospects acquired from the Ottawa Senators in the Dion Phaneuf trade, became the 12^th player to make his NHL debut for the Leafs this season, joining William Nylander, Zach Hyman, Byron Froese, Nikita Soshnikov, Brendan Leipsic, Kasperi Kapanen, Rinat Valiev, Frederik Gauthier, Garret Sparks and Viktor Loov. It’s actually 13 if you include goalie Antoine Bibeau, who dressed as a backup for 11 games this season, but didn’t see any action.

To put that into perspective, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, the last time the Leafs had that many players make their NHL debuts in the same season was 1917-18. And there’s a couple of things you need to know about that. First, the team wasn’t even called the Maple Leafs, they were known as the Arenas. Second, the reason why that many players made their NHL debuts that season was it was the first year of existence for the NHL and every player on the team was making his debut in the league.

But here’s the thing. Of the 12 guys on that team, 10 of them had actually played pro in the National Hockey Association, which was the precursor to the NHL, so they weren’t rookies at all. So that makes your 2015-16 Maple Leafs the greenest bunch in franchise history.

Some of this could be expected, since the Leafs have followed through with their stated intention of embarking on a massive rebuild. (Although you can have had to have had a ‘build’ at some point in order to have a ‘rebuild,’ no? But that’s not the point.) For the first time in a number of years, the Leafs have an impressive stable of young prospects who have merited at least a look at the NHL. That has been exacerbated by a run of injuries and a dumping of a number of veterans at the trade deadline.

It’s rare, but not unheard of, to have that many raw rookies in a season. The Atlanta Thrashers had 12 debuts in 2001-02, as did the Chicago Blackhawks in ’03-04, the New York Islanders in 2005-06 and ’08-09 and the Calgary Flames in 2013-14. The last team to have more rookies was the 1991-92 San Jose Sharks, who were in their first year in the league. None of those teams really amounted to much and some of them were downright terrible. None of the 12 players who made debuts with the Blackhawks was with the team when it won the Stanley Cup six years later.

The Leafs are obviously hoping to write a different script with the core of this group.