Toronto Maple Leafs: What Constitutes a Successful Season This Year?

The Toronto Maple Leafs should be the NHL’s most exciting, popular team.

A breath of fresh air to the stale conformity of virtually every other NHL team, the Toronto Maple Leafs are young, cool, and immensely talented.

With the best coach/GM combo in the league, a great roster, and some of the most likable players in the NHL, there is really only one thing that could have prevented them from becoming a model franchise in the NHL –

blowing a 3-1 series lead to the hated Canadiens.

But it happened, so where do we go from here?

Toronto Maple Leafs: What’s Next

The loss to the Canadiens – even though it featured two straight multigoal comebacks, and two OT losses, and was done without the help of John Tavares and (for the last game) Jake Muzzin – was perhaps the worst one I’ve seen.

As a lifelong member of Leafs Nation, as well as a guy who writes about the team and talks with its fans every single day of the year, even in the summer, I am uniquely qualified to discuss losing, and even if that isn’t quite the brag I think it is, if I say it’s the worst one, it’s the worst one.

It’s not just the 54 years of losing. It’s not that they were legitimately the better team and that they deserved to win, or that they gave a great effort and still failed…. the worst part was the tease.

At 3-1, with Montreal’s coach sitting his best young players, and home-ice advantage, it seemed like a done deal.  You aren’t going to lose a series you entered with the biggest win probability in modern NHL history after being up 3 to 1.

The only thing I can compare it with – in terms of disappointment and unlikihood – were the Brexit vote and the Trump election – just two things so stupid and unlikely that they didn’t even seem like possibilities in any way.

But as we know, all three things happened.  At least the Leafs losing didn’t push us any closer to the actual apocalypse – so there’s that!

So where do we go from here? We just keep grinding, that’s all. Part of the fun of winning is that you usually don’t win. Multiply that by 54 and it will be all that much sweeter.

This team should have had better results – they were good enough on paper to get them, and frankly, they played well enough to get them (11 straight playoff games with a positive expected goals rating).

Will they eventually get better? I think they will.  The reason I think that is because this isn’t just a collection of good hockey players, but it’s a collection of great people, and, even in spite of the losing, they’ve not given up.  They stuck with their plan, and the plan is a good one.

So what is a successful season this year?

Some might say it’s Stanley Cup or bust, but I’d say that since the team’s two most recent losses were hard-luck and not the fault of effort or bad play, I think they deserve some slack.   just being competitive all year, and at least coming close to a division title and President’s Trophy, then following that up with just one playoff victory is enough. If they get that, I’m happy.

I’ll be happier if they get more, but for now, I’d just like to see some progress.