The Toronto Maple Leafs Are Right to Not Care What We Think

The Toronto Maple Leafs have entered the off-season with an extremely angry fanbase.

After losing to the Montreal Canadiens, the fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs are so angry that they are demanding change.

The team, however, does not care.

Demand what you want, but the team is no longer interested in giving you want you want, and that is not only a good thing, it’s just about the best thing that has ever happened to this franchise.

The Toronto Maple Leafs Finally Have Good Management

For too long, every time something went poorly, the media and fans would make noise until the franchise reacted.  It sometimes seemed like the media was an assistant GM.

This resulted in years and years of the team chasing success without ever putting a plan in place and sticking to it.  So this summer, while fans are demanding things ranging from reasonable (someone else in charge of the power-play) to insane (firing the GM; trading Morgan Rielly or Mitch Marner) the team is busy sticking to the blue-print that saw then dominate play vs Montreal only to get unlucky results.

The Leafs Management is making you eat your vegetables, basically. They know what’s good for you, and even if you don’t like it now, it’s going to make you healthier later.  This is the correct way to manage a team because if you or I had an opinion the Leafs cared about, they would hire us, but they won’t and they shouldn’t.

When the Leafs re-signed Simmonds and Spezza, and publicly committed to sticking with their top-heavy salary structure, I saw a lot tweets with people saying some variation of “with everyone coming back, where will the change be?”

The answer is: There won’t be much change, and there shouldn’t be much change, and if you don’t like that the team doesn’t care because they are willing to bet their careers that they are right.

And good for them. I for one appreciate their commitment to things like math, avoiding confirmation bias, avoiding recency bias, the use of long-term thinking, probability and common sense.  Even more so, I appreciate them sticking to their plan in this age of instant gratification and constant complaining.  I also commend them for realizing that they are currently unpopular and sticking with what they believe in and know to be true, despite this.

The fact is, they are way smarter than their critics.  Their critics are emotional, drained from a pandemic, bored, and for the most part, not qualified to make the criticisms they make.  For the first time in the history of the Maple Leafs franchise, this is something management can say with confidence.  The irony that most of their critics want them to be run in the same way that saw them fail for 50 straight years is absolutely hilarious to those of us paying attention.

There are things that are true, that Leafs Nation doesn’t want to hear: 1) the team lost only because it got unlucky 2) they have one of the best rosters in the NHL 3) they have one of the best farm systems in the NHL 4) they were correct to set their salary cap structure up the way they did 5) they don’t have  a single bad contract on the team 6) they have the second best player in the world and, at worst, the 5th or 6th best player in the world on their roster.  7) They are set up to be competitive for years.

Skeptics always said the Leafs could never commit to a five-year rebuild because their fans wouldn’t stand for it.  They were 100% right, it turns out.

The Toronto Maple Leafs – for maybe the first time ever – are ignoring the fans and the media (and the rest of the league) and doing things the right way. It might not seem like it right now, but we are extremely lucky to have Shanahan and Dubas in charge of this team.

As for all the people who are “done” with the Leafs and ironically refuse to get behind the best version of this team we’ve seen in over 50 years, well,  I hear Seattle is nice this time of year.