Toronto Maple Leafs: How the NHL’s Best Young Team Supposedly Failed
By James Tanner
Several things have combined to make the Toronto Maple Leafs the NHL’s most underrated team.
The soul crushing loss to the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the NHL playoffs was just the coup de grace on a series of events that has taken the NHL’s most exciting up-and-coming team and rendered them as a failure before they even get a real chance to show what they can do.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are a team with Auston Matthews, a 23 year old superstar capable of scoring at a goal-per-game pace, and who is objectively the only player in the NHL with even a slight chance of displacing Connor McDavid as the best in the world any time soon.
He hasn’t entered his prime, and his wingman, Mitch Marner, though not quite as talented, is still himself a franchise player and likely the best player, other than Auston Matthews, to play for the Toronto Maple Leafs since the NHL expanded beyond six teams.
But none of that matters, apparently, because the Leafs are garbage…at least according to NHL analysts, rival GMs and Leafs fans themselves. It’s due to a crazy combination of events that one day will be almost incomprehensible to people who didn’t live through it, so allow me to document it.