Maple Leafs: Brian Burke Deserves Credit for Current Success

The Toronto Maple Leafs rebuild lasted about five seconds.

The main reason it seemed to be so short was because for a while, they were accidentally rebuilding while trying to win. Morgan Rielly and William Nylander were added after years in which the team was bad because it was poorly managed and assembled, not because the team was actively trying to rebuild.

Even Mitch Marner was drafted after Brenden Shanahan’s Year of Observation. (The first season after he was hired, he kept Nonis and Carlyle / Horacek and the team was in a playoff spot near Christmas before they suddenly couldn’t score and lost enough games that Carlyle was fired). The Leafs were looking to the future at this point, and they finished low enough to draft fourth overall, but they didn’t enter the season with the express purpose to rebuild. They still had Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf, etc.

A full rebuild really didn’t become a reality until Nonis was fired. Up until that point you were asking a guy to dismantle everything he built and start over. Certainly Nonis wasn’t even trading Phil Kessel or allowing the Leafs to get Auston Matthews.

Once this was happening, the phrases Five Year Plan or Proper Rebuild became used to the point of cliché. The Leafs didn’t need that long, because they’d accidentally been rebuilding since 2009.

Brian Burke (and to a lesser extent, Dave Nonis)

Brian Burke gets a deservedly bad rap sometimes. He’s loud, old, resistant to change and aggressively intense. His personality hides a thoughtful and smart guy who has made some great moves in his career, most of which he’s then undercut by not being patient enough.

When the Toronto Maple Leafs hired Burke, I was very excited. I defended his vision and moves for a retrospectively embarrassingly long time. I thought it was a huge mistake when they fired him. Even at that point, I liked him and defended him against critics.

But right around this time, I had started writing about hockey and that led to me learning about Advanced Stats. This led to me making a complete 180 on how I thought about the game of hockey. I learned of the importance of the puck-moving defenseman, the uselessness of face-offs, and started to question things like fighting, the need for enforcers, role-players etc.

I went from a Brian Burke defender to detractor in about five seconds. The Leafs at the time where run by old-school hockey guys and all of their moves that I liked back then (getting rid of MacArthur, trading for Bernier, buying-out Grabovski) I have since learned were objectively bad.

Basically, I learned new information and I changed my mind in order to accommodate it. This should be something we celebrate, but one thing our society does that is extremely stupid is equate changing your mind with weakness. It’s not hypocritical to change your mind, and you should try it sometime. Digression over.

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Anyways, just while I was learning to re-think Burke’s tenure as Leafs GM, something else happened, hard to say what, but it made it impossible for me to like a loud mouthed ginger.

So Burke – who, perhaps unfairly – has been treated as sort of an anachronistic dinosaur, hasn’t really gotten the credit he deserves for Today’s Leafs team.

Burke, Continued

Burke made some rash decisions that didn’t work out, and he compounded them by being unlikable at times. But he gets remembered as being worse than he was because the team he had was just so disappointing on a level that hurt even Leafs fans used to such disappointment. Kessel and Phaneuf were complimentary pieces, not building blocks and nothing is ever going to change that.

But it’s blinded us to the fact that Burke is as much the architect of this team as anyone.

Burke Drafted Nazem Kadri. Nazem Kadri is a _____ awesome hockey player and one of the best draft and develop stories in Toronto Maple Leafs history.

Burke drafted Connor Brown.

Burke drafted Morgan Rielly.

Burke acquired JVR and signed Tyler Bozak.

Burke traded for Jake Gardiner – the NHL’s most underrated defenseman,

The reason the Toronto Maple Leafs rebuild lasted only about 380 days is because of Brian Burke. Teams that finish 30th don’t generally already have a core of players as good as JVR, Bozak, Kadri, Rielly and Gardiner.

The Leafs added – somehow – eight NHL ready rookies at the same time, but the reason it worked is because they had a core of near-elite players already in their primes. They had those players because Brian Burke made some seriously great moves.

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The Leafs best winger (or arguably second best after Nylander), two of their top three centres, one of their best young players, and their two best defenseman are all on the team today because of Brian Burke.

That’s about a third of the team. Time to give Burke a third of the credit. If the Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup this year, they ought to be giving Burke a ring.

*A previous version of this story credited Burke for signing Leo Komarov. Thanks to the comments section for quickly pointing out that Komarov was a John Ferguson Jr. draft pick, and for reminding me that Burke drafted Brown.

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