Toronto Maple Leafs Are Successful Despite Results

The Toronto Maple Leafs lost in yet another first round series.

Of course, as fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, we are used to losing, but it’s the way in which the current iteration of our team loses that really gets to you.

In the past, the reason the Leafs used to lose was because they were a bad team.  Since they were expected to be terrible, it wasn’t that hard when they lost. When they lost, it was deserved.  And most of all, expected.

The problem with the current team is that they are excellent and have basically no discernable flaws (at least, not ones that aren’t put there post hoc).  The current version of the Leafs is everything we were promised when Brenden Shanahan set out to build this team seven years ago. It’s an exciting, young, talented team that is the centre of a players-first, community-oriented organization that is the class of the NHL.

Success Obscured

The Toronto Maple Leafs are on the cutting edge of everything, have spared no expense in making it happen, and have put in place what appears to be a prospect pipeline and organizational philosophy that should keep them constantly competitive for the immediate and long-term future.

It’s absolutely crazy that you have to tell people that a team with a 25 year old William Nylander, a 24 year old Mitch Marner and a 23 year old Auston Matthews has a bright future.  No team in hockey can match this, and for 50+ years the Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t come close. (If I had of quoted stats for this article, they would have been from naturalstattrick.com).

The only thing that Shanahan has failed to deliver on is winning. Admittedly, that is a pretty big thing, but the evidence that the Leafs are top team who got unlucky is overwhelming to the point where the only people who can doubt it are people who are conditioned to react to binary results. (Read: pretty much everyone).  Win you are great, lose and you are a loser.

Such an outlook fails to see the nuances of playing a luck-based game where one player (the goalie) has an outsized effect on results, and which ignores the large sample size of a regular season and bases it’s championship  on the outcome of a variance filled tournament, while managing games in such a way as to shrink the talent discrepancy between any two teams to be as small as possible.

This isn’t to say that you should care who actually win, it’s a request to consider that losing is really only losing when you don’t give a solid effort, learn anything or act in a way befitting a champion of your sport.

So anyways, a fun thing to do is tell people who are mad about not winning for almost sixty years that their team, if not for bad luck, would be considered the best team in the NHL.  Then try swearing that despite all appearances, you are completely serious and not influenced by anything other than the evidence.