The Toronto Maple are in a bad spot.
With five losses in a row, pressure mounting on the coach, and expectations not being anywhere close to met, the Toronto Maple Leafs are in trouble.
But not that much trouble.
Things might look bad, but they’re really not.
Toronto Maple Leafs Moves Coming
Six regulation wins in 22 tries, and just one in the last three weeks.
The schedule has been brutal, and the injuries bordering on ridiculous, but the Leafs need to be better.
So you’ve lost five in a row and have three days before your next game. What’s the move?
Fire the GM? Not a chance. He gets minimum one coach to burn, and he’s done nothing but keep his team together, make great draft picks and add upper echelon players to his roster.
Plus, you can’t really judge what he’s doing until he’s got a coach in place that compliments and implements his vision.
Make a trade? Hard to do when you’re struggling and the vultures are circling making you pathetic offers at pennies on the dollar.
And really, what alterations do you make to a roster before you’ve tested it by playing it the style you built it to play? Trading a core player during a losing streak is a terrible idea, and moving out non-core players won’t cause much of a shakeup.
Call ups? Rasmus Sandin is the only difference maker available and they’re not going to call him up and start giving him top pairing minutes, so this wouldn’t really be considered a shake up.
That doesn’t leave many options.
The worst part is that the Toronto Maple Leafs have not only hired the coach Kyle Dubas twice brought in when he fired someone else, they’ve also paid him like an NHL coach in order to avoid losing him to another team.
So if they don’t fire Mike Babcock now and replace him with Sheldon Keefe, they’re just delaying what virtually every person who follows the team knows is going to happen anyways.
Since that is the case, and since a shakeup of some kind is needed, it’s hard to see the Leafs not acting.
They don’t play until tomorrow night at 10 PM Eastern Time. That’s almost three long days between games, and after the week they just had, it’s really hard to see them just standing pat.
And if Babcock is coaching the game on Tuesday, will there be lineup changes? Might we see Cody Ceci on the bottom pairing? Justin Holl getting a shot with Morgan Rielly? A top line powerplay unit staying on the ice for longer than 55 seconds?
Maybe some defensive faceoffs for Matthews? Wingers not taking important PK draws?
Or will we just see stubborn old Babcock going about his business the exact same way? Time will tell, but it’s an interesting week in Leafs Nation, that is for sure.