Toronto Maple Leafs: You Best Believe That I am Bitter

The Toronto Maple Leafs biggest rival has made it to the Stanley Cup Final.

The Montreal Canadiens deserve congratulations, and I especially feel happy for their long suffering fans, but anyone thinking the Toronto Maple Leafs should take lessons from them is completely wrong.

Remember, the NHL is a league with near full parity, due to a salary cap, and which plays a game where one player, the goalie, has an outsized effect on the outcome of games. The league then takes further steps to dilute it’s talent and equalize the disparity between good and bad teams by changing the rules in the playoffs to make it easier for bad teams to stop good teams.

If that sounds bitter, let me make this clear: I am very bitter.

The Leafs have a better team, and they were screwed by injury, and by poorly timed (and astronomically unlikely) slumps. To say nothing of uncalled headshots in overtime.

Montreal Canadiens: Failing Upwards

The Leafs do everything right – they have the NHL’s deepest team, they have more stars than any other team, they have smart, young, progressive coaches and managers.  They have the second best player in the world, and even have a top five prospect system.

They entered the series vs Montreal as (I am pretty sure) the biggest favorite since computers gave us the power to model playoff series outcomes.  According to the best model known to hockey – Dom C’s at the Athletic –  they had an 80% chance of beating Montreal.

That means that even without the Tavares and Muzzin injuries, the Leafs would still lose one in five times.  Therefore, considering they are a team built around a very young core,  you would think people would be very patient with them and happy to enjoy having the best version of the franchise we’ve seen in over 50 years.

Unfortunately, a weird confluence of events makes that impossible.  The Leafs have (as mentioned) over 50 years of cumulative failure, their biggest rival is having success, and to top it off, the guy they fired (correctly) as their GM is also on the verge of making the Final.

Winning is a funny thing – it covers up a lot of problems, and the inverse is also true. Losing not only exposes problems, but it invents them.  It’s kind of funny to remember that before the Leafs lost, their supposedly bad salary cap structure had just made them Stanley Cup favorites and almost won them a President’s Trophy.

If you consider how fluky their loss was – a guy who wouldn’t have made their team kicked their captain in the head; an uncalled major penalty in overtime led to a loss; their almost-goal-per-game-superstar scored once on 35 shots – we shouldn’t even be mad about it.

The opposite is also true: The Canadiens often healthy scratch one of their best players.  They spent almost $15 million on goalies.  They often play their worst defenseman and scratch their best ones.  They are not a deep team, and they have no stars.

But hey- their goalie caught fire at the right time so let’s just build a bad team on purpose and hope to get lucky.  Go Habs!

Just in case you think the Leafs should copy the Canadiens, keep in mind they finished in what would normally be 5th in the Atlantic, were the 10th ranked Eastern Conference team and finished 18th overall in a league where the 16 teams make the playoffs.

Their goalie has stopped 93% of shots for 17 games, and despite not winning more than three in a row at any time in the regular season, they have gone on a magical run where they won 11 out of 13.

And good for them –  just don’t apply magical thinking to this run. The Canadiens are the beneficiaries of luck, and they are not succeeding because they are deep, or built for the playoffs, or because they have better GMs or coaches.

The Habs may be having their moment, but the Toronto Maple Leafs are set up to compete long-term.  The Habs managed to beat the Leafs just four times in regulation in 17 tries.  The Leafs are better in every way, and this is just the way it goes sometimes.