The Toronto Maple Leafs lead both the North Division and the NHL in points, but aren’t necessarily being credited with being a top team.
So many people spent so long irrationally hating anything Kyle Dubas has done that people are finding novel (and often hilarious) ways to discredit the Toronto Maple Leafs success. There is the idea that Dubas capitulated on his vision and “started doing things the right way” despite the fact this isn’t true and makes no sense.
I’ve even heard other people say the Leafs success stems from Brendan Shanahan secretly taking over from Kyle Dubas, despite the Leafs unwavering commitment to the vision they set out years ago.
These ideas are pretty silly, but ultimately harmless. One more pervasive discreditation of the Leafs, and one that has been said by much more serious people, is that the Toronto Maple Leafs accomplishments this season are because they supposedly play in an easy division.
The NHL is a salary capped, professional league with near full parity, where the worst team beats the best team almost four times out of ten, so this is patently ridiculous, but still, it gets repeated pretty often.
Toronto Maple Leafs and the North Division
I seem to remember everyone being really mad that the Leafs couldn’t get through the first round over the last four years, but I don’t remember anyone excusing their failure to advance due to how hard their division was.
The Leafs played in a division with Tampa and Boston, the two best teams in the NHL for the last several years. Had last season not required a play-in due to the cancelation of the last portion of the regular season, the Leafs most likely would have finished third in their division and had an opening round matchup against either Tampa or Boston.
The reward for winning that would have been a date with Tampa or Boston. Essentially, ever since the Leafs have been a contending team, they have had to run a gauntlet just to get to the semi-finals, and been in a position where the most likely scenario was that even if they’d won a Stanley Cup, their hardest two series would have (ironically) been the first two.
I have seen whole forests pulped just so people could complain about how the Leafs couldn’t get out of the first round, despite the fact that the Bruins were a) the best team in hockey and b) the young upstart Leafs almost beat them both times, arguably even deserving to have done so.
So yeah, I find it more than a little hilarious when people say the Leafs aren’t a good team because they’re beating up on an easy division. It isn’t true, but if it was, true, so what – they previously played in the hardest division.
The divisions are actually pretty evenly matched. The East lacks elite teams but is the most average, while each other division includes two top teams (Tampa/Carolina, Toronto/Edmonton, and Vegas/Colorado). There is nothing that sets any of these division apart, and none of them are as strong as the previous Atlantic.
The fact is that the kind of person who wants to discredit the Leafs accomplishments this year is also the kind of person who will say this season doesn’t count if they win the Cup – basically the kind of person who finds something wrong with everything and assumes other people want to hear about it.
The Leafs are an elite team that plays in a division that isn’t significantly better or worse than any other in hockey, and even if it was, it wouldn’t matter since the NHL has almost full parity anyways. They are in first place because their brilliant general manager has built the best team in the league.