The Toronto Maple Leafs are due for a break.
Last year, the vultures all came out of the wood work. You couldn’t turn on a hockey show or read anything online without coming across someone ripping the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Did it matter that none of their narratives made any sense? Of course it didn’t. Results are what matter and when you don’t get them, no one cares. So when the Leafs finished 8th under Sheldon Keefe despite missing their two top blue liners for 25% of his (roughly) 50 games, no one cared because the Babcock games skewed their record so much.
When they lost in the playoffs, people still complained about their defense and team toughness, despite the fact they lost by one goal after a six month layoff to a team who posted the all-time best goaltending in an NHL playoff series.
The Leafs would have finished 5th or better last year, including the Babcock games, if Michael Hutchinson wasn’t literally the worst player in the NHL. Even with Hutchinson, they finish in the top five if Freddie Andersen just puts up an average Freddie Andersen season.
I could go on, but the point is that the Leafs were unlucky, not bad.
The Salary Cap
The Toronto Maple Leafs are an interesting study between perception and reality, and there is no better example of this than the salary cap.
Mathematically, we know, for a fact, that in a professional league all non-elite players are more or less interchangeable. Yes, pro sports are won on the margins, but from a salary cap perspective it is beyond dispute that mid-range salary players are a complete waste of money. This isn’t my opinion, this a mathematical certainty.
Every team should be looking to acquire as many stars as possible, and to do this, they should devote most of their money to star players, and then pay everyone else the league minimum, or as close to it as possible.
People criticize the Leafs cap situation, but they are, ironically, the only team in the NHL without a single bad contract. They do not have one long term deal they’d buy out of or cancel if they could.
The studs and duds approach isn’t just the optimal way to spend your salary cap, all other ways are both wrong and stupid – It’s just math and game theory. Is it wrong to use the word stupid in this context? I don’t think so, because the proof is absolute.
The NHL is a star driven league where 90% of the players are interchangeable, and as such the Toronto Maple Leafs are actually the only NHL team that knows what they’re doing when it comes to the salary cap. Furthermore, the availability of solid NHL players who can play anywhere below the first line is basically unlimited.
The Leafs approach will eventually result in wins, but in a pro league, even a large advantage is still subject to the whims of fate. The Leafs have so far resisted ridiculous calls to trade their star players, and hopefully they can can get have a successful season this year so that we can actually see their brilliance catch on with the rest of the league, and best of all, hear the doubters equivocate.
The hilarious thing is that even though the Leafs put most of their money into four players (three of which haven’t even peaked, with the other one being a sure-fire Hall of Famer) they have managed to assembled one of the two or three deepest teams in the NHL anyways.
And, please, stop saying that “no one has ever won with four players making this much money,” because it just so misleading and laughable. No one has ever tried this before. You might as well just say that no team has ever won with Auston Matthews before, even though he’s only ever played for one team.
But while that’s the worst thing people say about the Leafs, the discourse around the entire situation would make any smart person want to put their head through some drywall. Like, why would the team with arguably the best top-four in the NHL trade one of their forwards for a defenseman? Why would they ever trade one of their forwards when the history of the NHL says you have maybe a 2% chance of winning a trade in which you move a star player?
And why should anyone spend money on mid-range players when players such as Justin Holl, Ilya Mikheyev, Alex Barabanov, Mikko Lehtonen, Nick Robertson, Travis Dermott, Joe Thornton, Wayne Simmonds, Jason Spezza, etc. are all available for dirt-cheap, rock-bottom prices?
You can’t make this stuff up. I would even understand it if it wasn’t super easy to put their four playoff loses into a positive context, or point out the myriad of ways they should have gotten better results so far, but just didn’t.
It’s honestly so frustrating because there are about four ways in which it is really obvious the Leafs approach is correct (1. Star driven league, 2. Mid Range players have no value 3. Most players are interchangeable 4. cheap, talented players are always available for free) and yet despite the evidence, almost no one will accept it because of some unlucky results.
That should change this year.