Toronto Maple Leafs: Time to Make Moves to Win

The Rebuilding Phase of the Toronto Maple Leafs is officially over.

It’s driving me nuts that people keep saying it isn’t. A rebuild is where you stock assets and lose on purpose to get a high draft pick. It’s about moving out in-their-prime players for even more assets. The Toronto Maple Leafs have done that and moved on.

The next phase is about turning what they have into a winner and augmenting it with the finishing touches. A team with Gardiner, Kadri, Rielly, Andersen, Matthes, Marner and Nylander is not “rebuilding.” Making short-term moves doesn’t mean you don’t also make long-term moves concurrently. A team can have more than one objective – all I am saying is that the Leafs have a rare opportunity to game the system and they’d be crazy not to take it.

The next thing that drives me nuts is that a lot of people – the vocal ones at least – are very opposed to trading draft picks and signing / trading for veterans. This is crazy talk. If you’re not rebuilding then it means you’re trying to win.

The Leafs just lost a coin-toss to the best team in the NHL (Washington Capitals) and wouldn’t even have been playing them if not for the crappy luck that saw them lose 15 games after regulation. From the perspective of what their play could reasonably have achieved – i.e accounting for luck – the Leafs should have won the Atlantic Division.

So even though it’s easy to look at it one way and think of them as a 30th place team that lucked into an 8th playoff seed, that narrative doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Reasonably, the Leafs should be even better next year. A year of development, all that cap space, and a real chance to upgrade the roster because of the Ex-Draft and Free Agency.

It’s Time to Win

The number-one objection people make when you say this is some variation of “Didn’t they learn anything from their past?” and “Who do you think you are, Cliff Fletcher/ Brian Burke?”

What these objections fail to realize is that this isn’t accelerating something that requires patience like both aforementioned GMs were prone to do. This just happens to be the right time to make those kind of moves. Trading the #4 overall pick in 1997 when the team is clearly going nowhere is a bad move that lacks patience and critical thought and costs you Robert Luongo. Trading the 17th pick in 2017 when you’re on the verge of being the best team in the NHL isn’t close to the same thing.

The Leafs have a two-season window where Marner and Matthews will have almost no cap-hit. One more year before they have to re-sign Nylander. During this window, the Leafs will be able to game the salary cap like no team in history.

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With more than 20 million available, and more next year, the Leafs – who have three elite players on entry-level contracts – can stack their team for a brief run.

Being patient doesn’t make any sense. If you are patient, then you end up paying $25 million + to your three best players, severely limiting what you can do.

So, what the Leafs have to do right now is trade draft picks, maybe a prospect like Jeremy Bracco, maybe sign an offer sheet. Maybe sign UFA’s like Joe Thornton, Cody Franson and Kevin Shattenkirk.

Maybe all of them.

Whether or not you like those specific players is subjective. What is objectively true however, is that the Toronto Maple Leafs need to make moves to win now.

Next: How the Toronto Maple Leafs Can be the Best Team in the NHL

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