The Toronto Maple Leafs off-season could officially begin tonight.
Sure, the Toronto Maple Leafs have been off for a while (they played five games over a week about two months ago, but other than that, they’ve been off for almost seven months now) but the official off-season begins when the Stanley Cup Final is over.
And thanks to some terrible officiating (who could expect anything else?) the Dallas Stars are facing elimination tonight.
Personally, I’ve been hoping for the upset, but it looks like Tampa is going to win. That isn’t a bad thing for the Leafs, as no team in the NHL is built more similarly than they are. And besides, I’ve been enjoying the hilarious post-hoc assumption that the Bolts are winning because they added a couple gritty replacement level defenseman to their roster, and not, say, because hockey is a completely fluky game determined by one player (the goalie) where upsets happen all the time.
Toronto Maple Leafs and the Tampa Bay Lightning
The Lighting last year, just like the Leafs this year, were the victims of bad luck. In fact the Lightning are an instructive case to a team like the Leafs: stick with the plan.
The Leafs are the fourth youngest team in the NHL, and if they had won the Cup this year, they’d have been one of the youngest teams to ever do so. They play in the NHL’s toughest division (because it has the two best teams and the path out of the first round almost always goes through one of them), and when we compare Toronto to those two teams, we almost always forget to remember that they are teams who’ve been building for a decade.
Still, Tampa has been a powerhouse over the last five years, going to the Conference Final once, and making it to two Stanley Cup Finals. In the other two years, they missed the playoffs completely, and lost in the first round.
This should demonstrate the volatility of a salary cap league. It should keep people from overreacting to the unfortunate loss to Columbus, which is one of the flukiest, least deserved, most statistically improbable losses in NHL history.
So when the Toronto Maple Leafs off-season gets underway tonight, let’s keep one thing in mind: The level of talent on the roster, their record, and their statistics all indicate that they are a team on the verge of dominance in the NHL.
Remember game two vs Columbus where they showed the kind of dominating force they are on the verge of becoming. Remember the fact that in games were Michael Hutchinson didn’t start, the Leafs were competing for a Presidents Trophy.
It’s been 50 odd years since Toronto had a hockey team this good, I think its time they were embraced as such. It’s going to be a very interesting off season, but the most important thing for the Toronto Maple Leafs is patience.