The new NHL season is about to start, and the Toronto Maple Leafs are a top team to some, and all but written off by others.
To be sure, the Toronto Maple Leafs have not won anything – it’s been 54 years since the last Stanley Cup and 17 years since the last playoff series win. After two seasons at the helm, Kyle Dubas, despite spending a good portion of his time as GM correcting horrible miscalculations that his predecessor made, is on the hottest of hot seats.
Which is completely ridiculous, as anyone with a basic understanding of math could tell you. The NHL regular season is far more useful in predicting the future success of a team than the playoffs are, and the Leafs, we know, are a very good regular season team.
This might sound counter-intuitive, but anything can happen in a seven game series. 82 games gives you a much better idea of what the team really is, and since Sheldon Keefe took over, the Leafs have been one of the best regular season teams.
And yet there is a perception of this team as a complete failure that is running out the clock to the inevitable departure of their current management team.
Toronto Maple Leafs Will Have the Last Laugh
I am looking around and seeing people predicting, with a straight face, that the Leafs are a borderline wildcard team with no chance against Florida and Tampa.
They want the Leafs to fail.
I’ve seen people online who have literally been complaining for a half-decade now about the Leafs tendency towards smaller skilled forwards and their overall prioritization of skill over everything. They hate the Leafs salary cap structure, they rag on Nylander constantly, they hated Jake Gardiner, they complain about Matthews and Marner’s personalities, they make fun of analytics, they will never forgive the Leafs for firing Lou Lamoriello and hiring Kyle Dubas, and….a large portion of Leafs Media seems to agree with them.
Considering how conservative (small “c”; not politically) the NHL is overall, the Leafs have rocked the boat quite a bit in the last several years, and without anything to show for it, people are getting restless. It’s understandable.
But I think this group of fans has taken a premature victory lap and that they are going to made to look foolish by the Leafs success this season. Assuming, of course, they avoid the kinds of ridiculous anomalies that have prevented them from winning in the past two seasons.
If they are lucky enough to get the results needed for Kyle Dubas to keep his job, then they are going to be set up as one of the best franchises in professional sports for years to come. From professionalism and dedication to player safety, and to the player’s general interests, the Dubas Administration has few, if any, peers.
Their drafting is raved about by draft-savvy nerds, and the Matthews/Marner combo is eventually going to produce in the playoffs the exact same way they do in the regular season. It’s a matter of when, not if. The secondary wave of star players is starting to trickle in, and the salary cap is going to be more flexible going forward.
If they gets success this season, they’ll be set up for a long, long time with a solid foundation.
The Maple Leafs had a bad run the last two playoffs in terms of results, but what almost never gets talked about is that they had a positive expected goals rating in their last 11 playoff games, dating back to last summer vs Columbus.
That means that they were in every game. It means they didn’t choke, and that, given a bigger sample size, they would have ended up winning most of their games.
It’s only human nature to view a team that always loses in a negative light. But this team is hungry and talented, and deep and balanced. Those who have written them off will eat their words because they are on the verge of being an incredibly special team.