Stanley Cup Final Shows Toronto Maple Leafs Made Huge Error
By James Tanner
The Toronto Maple Leafs have been done playing for a while now.
The Stanley Cup was awarded last night to the Washington Capitals. For the Toronto Maple Leafs, that’s got to sting a little.
Last year, when the Capitals had one of the best teams ever assembled in the salary cap era, the Leafs took them to six games and nearly took them out. This year, the Leafs tied the Capitals in the standings and (on paper) are a vastly superior team.
The Capitals opponent, the hilariously overrated expansion team who looked pretty ordinary once their goalies stopped playing like the greatest goalie of all time certainly doesn’t even have anything close to the roster the Leafs have.
Hockey is a game of luck as much as it is anything else, and there’s a certain irony in seeing two much worse teams play for the Cup when the Leafs haven’t done it in 51 years. You can see that as funny, awkward, embarrassing, ironic – whatever. Mostly, it’s just bad luck – every few years the best teams in the league (Nashville, Winnipeg, Tampa, Boston, Pittsburgh and Toronto) get knocked out early and a couple of Cinderella’s play for the Cup. It happens.
But this does highlight a pretty big failing on the part of Lou Lamoriello – he should have went for it and didn’t.
Toronto Maple Leafs MGMT Blows Big Chance
Some hilariously hindsight afflicted fans complain that the Leafs didn’t receive anything for James van Riemsdyke, Tyler Bozak and other unrestricted free agents before they will be able to walk for nothing. They are using the fact that the Leafs didn’t make it out of the first round (even though they almost did) to justify this nonsense.
But what team is going to sell off assets when they’re tied for 6th overall in the league? You must view keeping the UFAs the same way you’d view the rental players they did (Plekanec) and tried to (McDonugh) acquire.
No, the Leafs problem wasn’t that they didn’t sell off UFAs, it was that they didn’t try harder to build their team up for the post season.
With Matthews, Marner and Nylander on entry-level deals with essentially no cap-hit, a goalie having a career season, a roster filled with in-their-prime players on team friendly deals (JVR, Bozak, Kadri, Gardiner, Andersen etc), two young speedy potential stars on the fourth line (Kapanen and Johnsson) and assets, cap space and draft picks to burn, it’s clear the Leafs missed out on a very rare chance to cheat the salary cap and load up for a big run.
Like I said yesterday when I pointed out they have a similar situation this upcoming season (though not as good because Nylander will cost tons now), these situations are extremely rare. Due to the rarity of the situation, the Leafs should have paid the necessary cost to improve their team.
What would a top pairing defenseman meant to a team that only just lost to the Bruins? What would two of them have meant? There are no guarantees, obviously, but the Leafs played it safe and they didn’t sell off anyone, and they didn’t really do much to improve.
This was Lou Lamoriello’s biggest failure. This isn’t hindsight either – the East was ripe for the taking with the Penguins struggling, and if I said it once I said it 100 times. But now that we know that the Capitals (their team stats are brutal and just happening to win won’t change that) and the Knights (give me a break) played for the Cup, the Leafs hesitance to load up for a run looks like a terrible mistake.
As Wayne Gretzky supposedly said “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
See ya on the Island Lou, thanks for nothing.