The Toronto Maple Leafs have rebuilt their team into a powerhouse.
It might not seem like it if you go only by this season’s results, but an honest assessment of the Toronto Maple Leafs compared to the rest of the NHL must take into account goaltending ,injuries, coaching changes, bad luck, good luck, and an assortment of other factors.
In short, if you just look at just the standings and make an assessment, it will be wrong.
Tthe Leafs are 19 points back of the Bruins and yet are just four wins back since the day they switched coaches. During this time, the Leafs have a better team Corsi, and a better expected goals percentage. (Two things that better predict the future than any other measurements we have).
That means that since the Leafs have – at the very least – not been outplayed by Boston since they switched coaches, even though the Leafs played over 20% of those games without their two best defensemen.
Even though the Leafs played many of those games missing five or six players from their lineup, and even though they were learning to deploy an entirely new system. (To say nothing of their randomly terrible goaltending).
So when TSN holds their daily “Where did the Leafs rebuild go wrong chat,” it’s pretty frustrating.
Sure, the Leafs have made mistakes (didn’t fire Babcock earlier enough, didn’t go for it enough while the team had more entry level contracts) but the idea that they “veered off track” is, frankly, ridiculous.
Craig Button suggested that the Leafs made an error in signing Tavares, despite the fact that he’s one of the best players in the entire world. In the NHL, star players drive success and the idea that Tavares only brings offense that the Leafs didn’t need is, frankly, preposterous.
Teams tank for the purpose of getting a Tavares. Adding a hall of fame player in his prime is something few teams have ever actually done.
To paint this as an error, or as the day the Leafs “rebuild” went off the tracks is just flat out wrong. Elite talent is so rare that paying for it is never the wrong move.
Keep in mind that the Leafs paid Cody Ceci, Andreas Johnsson and Kasperi Kapanen ten million dollars this season for players a healthy Toronto Maple Leafs roster wouldn’t play above their third line.
How exactly is a high contract to a hall of fame player keeping you from competing when you can spend $10 million dollars on three players for the bottom of your lineup? Losing all three and adding an elite defenseman would make the Leafs a better team, so Tavares isn’t actually preventing anything.
The Toronto Maple Leafs Rebuild
The idea of a “rebuild” is a misnomer. You are never done trying to improve your team.
The NHL has this “5 Year Rebuild” myth, but it’s based entirely on an old system.
Back before the 2004 lockout, there was no salary cap and players (mostly) couldn’t be unrestricted free agents until they were 32.
This meant that you had to slowly rebuild your team.
Today, the salary cap and the ability to sign free agents in their prime makes the process much quicker and much more fluid.
Today, you don’t do a traditional five-year rebuild. Ideally, what you do instead is bottom out, reap the rewards, and then try to win while your new star players don’t cost anything.
The Toronto Maple Leafs – as I spent years saying in this column – should have tried harder to win while Matthews, Marner and Nylander were on their entry-level deals.
Regardless, they now have those players locked up for the majority of their prime years (mostly to team-friendly deals) and should be able to compete for years.
So if the Leafs made one error, it was that two straight GM’s went into the playoffs with Hainsey and Zaitsev in their top four.
Regardless, the Leafs “rebuild” was pretty much finished the day Auston Matthews made the team out of training camp. This tracks, since they’ve made the playoffs every year since then, and are currently among the teams in the league with the best rosters.
Even if you adhere to the five year thing, this would be year five. This would be the year where we’d expect some magic, but deep down understand there will probably be a learning curve.
It is absolutely ridiculous to sit here and say they should have been more patient and not signed Tavares. If anything, their mistake was being too patient after they did.
There is no benefit to the slow rebuild in today’s NHL. You’ve got to time it so you can stack your team with expensive players while your stars are cheap. In that sense, the Leafs blew it.
But they’ve still got a huge window to build a championship, with a team that features several of the best players in team history (Matthews, Marner, Nylander, Tavares, Rielly and Andersen are already among the best to wear the jersey) and is one of the most exciting in the NHL.
Don’t take it for granted and miss out on enjoying it because the GM doesn’t like grinders as much as you do. This is a good team, built to win.
They have no bad contracts, a ton of young talent, and some solid prospects on the way. It’s hard to imagine a team better suited to win over the next five or so years.