Toronto Maple Leafs: The Most Disappointing Player This Season

The Toronto Maple Leafs are in crisis after losing 5-games straight.

Disappointing wouldn’t even begin describing how the Toronto Maple Leafs season is going so far. Whereas starting the season it was suggested Mike Babcock needed to win at least one playoff series this season to keep his job, it’s now a question whether Toronto will even qualify for the playoffs and finish the season with Babcock behind the bench.

For the injury-plagued Toronto Maple Leafs to miss the playoffs this season, would be nothing short of a disaster. It would lay waste to the additional (rental) pieces of the Leafs Blueprint, carefully put together by Dubas in Jake Muzzin, Tyson Barrie, and Cody Ceci.

The Toronto Maple Leafs will play 10 of the next 12 games on the road, with Marner, Kerfoot, and Moore out due to injuries, it will be challenging not to fall behind on the divisional rivals for a playoff spot.

While the Toronto Maple Leafs aren’t exactly lucky when it comes to their schedule and injuries this season, both aren’t the factors to blame for the poor results.

So, who to blame?

Pressure on Mike Babcock has been since last playoff elimination, with the current results pressures is at an all-time high and speculation on whether he is (still) the right coach for this team is ever there.

It’s unreasonable, however, to put all the blame on Babcock. The players have their share in the results, they’re on the ice playing and performing badly, not always due to Babcock.

That’s why for this weeks roundtable, the staff writers of Editor In Leaf gathered to discuss this weeks roundtable question; “Who has been the most disappointing this season?”

My Take

Most disappointing so far? Take a pick, the players that have been disappointing are in the majority, those who exceeded or met expectations are the exceptions.

During the times when the Toronto Maple Leafs were actually really, really bad, Morgan Rielly was the exception to the rule. He was good, the beacon of better times to come. Now the better times are supposedly here, Rielly himself comes off a breakout season and he’s not even close to as good as last year.

His production is good, slightly less compared to last season, but still on pace for 64 points on the season. It’s his defensive game, however, that has been a nightmare this season. The Toronto Maple Leafs have 51 goals against, Rielly was on the ice for 21 of those goals, that’s just too much for the star-defenseman of this team.

When I woke up the morning after Pittsburgh served Toronto a dish off humiliation, I instantly wanted to blame Roman Polak for the recent results (an old habit), only to realize the Toronto Maple Leafs managed this horrid record without Roman Polak.

They managed to get the current, disappointing, record with Rielly, Muzzin, Barrie, and Ceci and despite the injuries, below league goaltending numbers, insane schedule, and everything else you can possibly think off, it still should be better.

Zoë Mason

When the Kadri trade went through, the reaction among Leafs Nation was positive. Despite losing a fan favorite, the club was also bidding goodbye to the problems he had caused in recent years — namely, his two playoff suspensions — and was welcoming a solid player in Alex Kerfoot and a star in Tyson Barrie.

Kerfoot quickly rose into coach Mike Babcock’s good graces, and rightfully. While his five goals and three assists so far this season aren’t superstar material, he’s a reliable third-line player on a team that’s been relying increasingly on its lower half to get it through a recent slump.

But where is Tyson Barrie? His season so far has been a blink and you miss it. By November 13th, 2018, Barrie had racked up one goal and thirteen assists for a whopping 14 points. That made him the seventh highest-scoring defenseman in the NHL by the quarter mark in the 2018-19 season.

Starting off this season with six assists, no goals, and a poor defensive record, the Leafs have not inherited the same player.

A lot of criticism has been directed at Mitch Marner this year, and while something intangible certainly seems different about his play, he’s actually only five points behind his career-best pace from last season. His 18 points are a solid start to the year, just not up to the standard he established in his breakout campaign.

Barrie, on the other hand, has a well-established pattern of performance, and this season’s start features his poorest numbers since 2013 when he was still breaking out of the minors.

It’s important to note that he’s a great player and it’s possible his slump can be attributed to starting with a new team. For the Toronto Maple Leafs sake, I hope that’s the case.

Alex Hobson

The most disappointing Leaf this season? Can I answer with the whole team?

In all seriousness, if I had to pick one it would have to be Tyson Barrie. But I wouldn’t even say he’s looked bad this season. He’s just not lighting up the scoresheet like he was expected to.

Coming into this season as the top name in the biggest blockbuster of the Leafs offseason, everyone knew that the microscope would be on Barrie. Coming fresh off of a 59 point season with Colorado and joining a team that thrives on offence, everyone expected Barrie to mimic his season in Colorado.

Instead, he has six assists in 22 games, has yet to score his first goal of the season, and has reportedly been the subject of trade calls from other teams.

It’s unfair to pin all the blame on Barrie this season because he’s seeing less powerplay time than what he was used to in Colorado and just less ice time in general. And if anything, this might be a good thing considering this is the worst start Barrie has ever seen.

He could be less expensive to re-sign and could hopefully see a turnaround in his game should it happen.

Overall, Barrie is in a slump he’s never seen before and whether it’s getting used to a new system, playing for a new coach, or just having general struggles finding the back of the net, I have faith that Barrie will turn it around at some point.

Eric Cruikshank

Cody Ceci, obviously.

At the beginning of the year, I honestly did not have any issues with Cody Ceci being placed on the top pairing with Morgan Rielly. I was not totally sold that the Leafs would be keeping him on the team for long anyways, due to the fact Dermott was not even going to be in the lineup at the start of the year, and I had high hopes that Sandin would become a regular on the team.

I considered this to be a smart way to try and build Ceci’s value up before trying to facilitate trade at some point during the season. This idea of a trade is still possible, but his value has only decreased since his time with the Maple Leafs.

There are times when I seriously wonder what is going on in his mind when positioned in the defensive zone. Far too often Ceci has been caught a mile away from the man he is supposed to be covering, and I think largely it is due to the fact he gets caught puck-watching.

Patrick Kane’s goal against the Leafs was a perfect example of this. Although it ended up deflecting off of Ceci and going in, he began covering Dylan Strome from behind the net, and when the puck came across the centre of the ice to Kane, he completely abandoned Strome who was wide open in front of the net. It’s defensive mishaps like that which can pile up and hurt your team in the long run.

In my opinion, I can see a potential set of defensive pairings that arguably looks better without Cody Ceci in the lineup. I think that Sandin has definitely made a case for himself to be ready to play in the NHL, and for a team that is hard-pressed for cap space, I can think of many other places to spend $4.5 million.

Spencer Teixeira

Despite a rocky start for the Toronto Maple Leafs this season, I do not believe that there are many players that have disappointed in terms of play, but there is one in particular; Tyson Barrie.

Acquired in the big off-season trade with the Avalanche, Barrie has been disappointing to absolutely no fault of his own. An offensive defenseman to his core, Barrie has been stuck back on many occasions and is yet to receive the powerplay time as with the Colorado Avalanche, despite thriving on this his entire career.

Barrie has also consistently played less than defensive anchor Cody Ceci which is simply unexplainable at this point.

Although I do not believe that Leafs head coach Mike Babcock deserves a lot of the hate he gets, he MUST answer for this. If he cannot, then turn to former Flyers head coach (why) Dave Hakstol, who runs the Toronto Maple Leafs defense, and if he can not answer, serious changes have to be made.

That being said, at the time I am writing this, Barrie has 6 assists in 22 games, which is simply not good enough considering the pure skill of the dynamic defender. I see a pretty clear solution to end the hate on Babcock and Barrie’s sluggish performance. Change the lines. That’s it.

Instead of rolling with the old and tired setup of;

Rielly-Ceci

Muzzin-Barrie

Dermott-Holl

Try this instead;

Rielly-Holl

Dermott-Barrie

Muzzin-Ceci

Or, if we want to get REALLY crazy;

Rielly-Muzzin

Sandin-Barrie

Dermott-Holl/Liljigren

These are not perfect line combos by any means but could provide a much-needed upstart to a sluggish D core that has underperformed so much this season.

Peri Gallacher

The Toronto Maple Leaf player I’ve been most disappointed in so far this season is, John Tavares.

Since being named captain at the beginning of the season I was interested to see how he would lead the Toronto Maple Leafs into a successful season with new hands at the helm, because while he was obviously the most experienced of the options on the team, the Islanders weren’t necessarily good while he was captain there, they only won 45% of their total games played his last season as captain.

Obviously their losses were not entirely his fault but, as captain of the team it’s his job to drive team morale and take the fall when things are bad and work to compensate for error in other parts of the team.

Now I’ll be fair and acknowledge he was out on injury for a couple weeks, and it was obvious he was missed on the ice. But when he’s on, it’s hard to see how he drives the team at all, in fact the leafs did substantially better their first 20 games captainless last season, than they have this season with a captain.

It was painfully obvious that team morale was low playing the Penguins, going into what would be the 5th loss in a row, no duh, none the less it’s Tavares duty as a captain to get into the locker room and give them words of encouragement – its only November, things can be turned around.

I’m not blaming JT’s lack of captaincy skills as to why the Toronto Maple Leafs are flunking so hard there’s much much more to that, but the role of a captain is to keep things going in a hard time and it’s been hard to see that being done in this situation and I’d like to see him step more into the leadership he’s been given and keep the teams confidence afloat in times of trouble.