Toronto Maple Leafs Don’t Need Past Winners For Future Success
The Toronto Maple Leafs don’t need a $10M goaltender to win a Stanley Cup next season.
As of right now, the Toronto Maple Leafs roster is filled with unproven winners, but that can all change with one long playoff run.
The funny thing about proven winners is that they’re not winners, until they win. That may sound like the dumbest sentence you’ve ever read, but look at the Colorado Avalanche for example, who just won the most recent Stanley Cup.
Darcy Kuemper and Nazem Kadri are going to make bank this summer and will be considered winners for the rest of their career, despite the fact that it took them 13 years since being drafted to finally win a championship.
A ton of fans said that Kadri was a “playoff liability”, while Kuemper was just an above-average goaltender who was currently on his fourth NHL franchise.
Heading into the season, if you did a fantasy draft, Kadri probably would have been a top-75 player drafted, while Kuemper may have been a top-10 goaltender on that list. However, after this season, team’s are going to be lining up for their services.
The same can be said about Andre Burakovsky and Josh Manson because they are now winners.
Toronto Maple Leafs Don’t Need To Go After “Winner’s”
Don’t get me wrong, Kuemper played great during the regular season and playoffs, but nobody needed him to play like Patrick Roy in his prime. Instead, they needed a goaltender who could steer the ship and not allow five goals, when Colorado scored four.
And that’s exactly what happened.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are not built like the Colorado Avalanche, but they’re pretty close. Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner are just as good as Nathan MacKinnon and Mikko Rantanen, while Gabriel Landeskog and Nazem Kadri are also a pretty similar duo as William Nylander and John Tavares.
Personally, I’d rather have Landeskog and Kadri, but it’s still apples and oranges.
The biggest difference in the Avalanche’s line-up is their defense, led by Cale Makar, Josh Manson, Devon Toews and Bowen Byram. Toronto’s core of Morgan Rielly, Mark Giordano, Timothy Liljegren, Jake Muzzin and T.J. Brodie is still good, but they clearly are not on the same level.
Everyone looks at Toronto’s roster as a team filled with loser’s, but it’s ironic because the one “winner” on the team, is the one that everyone’s willing to trade. Jake Muzzin has two Stanley Cup championship’s but because of his salary, age and injury issues, fans are pushing him out the door to clear space for someone better.
And when it comes to goaltenders, proven success obviously helps in terms of players like Andrei Vasilevski, Jonathan Quick and Tim Thomas over the past decade, but that’s not the only recipe to win.
Jordan Binnington, Corey Crawford, Anti Niemi and Matt Murray were all essentially nobody’s when they won their Stanley Cup in the past decade. You could even put Kuemper in that category with the Avalanche, since he wasn’t a house-hold name before joining Colorado.
As a result, Toronto doesn’t need a big-name goaltender to win.
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Instead, they need above-average goaltending, tight defense and for their big-boy’s to carry them. Whether it’s Jack Campbell, Mackenzie Blackwood or a goalie TBD, Toronto doesn’t need to find “winner’s” in order to win because they very well could have winner’s in the room who don’t even know it yet.