The Toronto Maple Leafs are easily the NHL’s most intriguing team right now.
On one hand, the Toronto Maple Leafs have lost five straight first-round playoff series.
On the other hand, each of those series is easily explainable and, put in the proper context (Tavares injury, Kadri suspensions, the best week of Elvis Merzlikins’ life) aren’t as bad as they seem.
This year’s version of the Leafs is pretty much the same as last year’s. The team (correctly) decided that trading core players and blowing up their plan, due to what amounts to weird results in a short sample size, would be a mistake.
Since process > results has been the Leafs mantra in the Kyle Dubas era, this was an easily foreseeable outcome.
Less sure, though, was whether or not the corporate suits who run the Toronto Maple Leafs would buy back in, or whether they’d overreact and either fire the GM or make him do something stupid (trade Nylander or Marner).
Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and Dubas and Shanahan will get at least one more years to right the ship.
So how do they do that? The thing is, there isn’t much they can do. They already have (and have had) one of the league’s best rosters. They addressed every problem they had, then lost again.
Handcuffed by a Pandemic-related Salary Cap Freeze, and by having to start his tenure out by fixing Lou Lamoriello’s mistakes (Marleau, Zaitsev) Dubas has still done well for himself and could have already won a cup by doing nothing differently (If Tavares avoided a first round injury, the Leafs – at worst – play Tampa for the Cup last summer). (All stats naturalstattrick.com).
What the Leafs need are some best-case-scenarios. If the team stays relatively healthy, they’ll do some damage, but if any of the following five situations occur, then the team is going to make their fans very, very happy.