The Toronto Maple Leafs: The Time to Contend Is Now

The Toronto Maple Leafs have an excellent  young team.

Auston Matthews, Morgan Rielly, Mitch Marner, William Nylander  have each been the successive best prospect the team has had in decades.  The Toronto Maple Leafs are, for the first time in the team’s recent history, a team built through the draft.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing in the media and among the fanbase as to what stage, exactly, the Leafs are in in their attempt to become a perennial Cup Contender.  The team the Leafs beat out for the final playoff spot last season is this year’s Stanley Cup Favorite – so things change fast.  And, like the Leafs, the Lightning are a team that has a crazy-high PDO, which means they probably can’t sustain their current level of success.  The Leafs can at least balance their high PDO against the fact that their three best players have been unlucky and they’ve had a bunch of injuries.

I don’t personally think the Lightning are that far ahead of the Leafs in terms of being a contender. The Leafs have a whole set of secondary core players who are in their primes and making reasonable money.  The Leafs have JVR on the third line and, were they so inclined, could set it up so one of Gardiner, Rielly and Zaitsev is on the ice for 100% of a game.  Their depth is underrated by a fanbase that is gun-shy about being good.

Time to Contend

Leafs fans are so self-conscious about having a good team that if you mention (correctly) that the team has under-performed so far this year and that they are a) a legit contender and b) in the midst of a dream scenario where they have a core group of prime players, and a cheap group of superstars on entry-level contracts, in addition to assets and cap-space, most of them don’t believe you, regardless of how logical your arguments, or how objectively, empirically true they are.

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This team has been managed so badly for three decades that the fans have the sports equivalent of PTSD. The team is ready to contend and objectively in a great place to make a move towards winning, and people just keep preaching the same non-sense about patience.

Just because the team lacked patience in the past and often sold out youth for immediate gratification, doesn’t mean that there isn’t an optimal time to do that.  By going ‘all in’ it doesn’t mean the Leafs will be totally selling out the future.  No one is suggesting that they do.

But at the same time, should the Leafs be able to acquire a player who upgrades their team, they have to be willing to pull the trigger.  Dermott, Liljegren, first-round picks, Kapanen and Brown all need to be on the table.  Keeping the majority of these players is smart, but you have to pay to upgrade and if you could convert some combination of those players into a legit partner for Morgan Rielly, then you’d have one of the best teams in the NHL.

Make  a Trade

Three years from now you might wish you never traded those guys.  But if you win a Cup in the meantime, you won’t care.  The fact is, that by the time the Leafs develop Liljegren into a top pairing player, if they ever do, Kadri, Andersen, Komarov, Zaitsev, Gardiner, Marleau, JVR and Bozak will all be well past their primes.

Next: Trade Deadline Roundtable

Being patient forever is just as stupid as not being patient at all.  This isn’t ‘rushing’ into anything.  This is simply recognizing that you’ll never have a better chance than this year.  The Toronto Maple Leafs have a chance to win the Stanley Cup this year, and the only reason to be patient is out of fear.  You have to take chances to win, and being afraid to act isn’t  a recipe for success.  The time for bold moves is now.