Toronto Maple Leafs Are Having a Quietly Excellent Off-Season

The Toronto Maple Leafs don’t care what you think.

For the first time in the modern era, the Toronto Maple Leafs do not make organizational changes at the whims of the fans and media.  This is an incredible, franchise altering, positive development, but it’s a bit like your mom making you finish your broccoli, so it’s a little bit unpopular.

William Nylander is perhaps the only player in Leafs history the combined might of the Toronto Media has been unable to run out of town.  Kyle Dubas might be the first executive who can say the same thing.

Clearly the slanted coverage about the Leafs needs to be taken with a grain of salt, because the NHL’s two media giants split ownership of the team and go far out of their way to avoid looking like they are pro-Leafs.

Add to that the general craziness of the market, a series of unlucky but respectable results, and you have a recipe for absolute mayhem when it comes to covering the team.

So you are excused if you have an extremely negative view of your favorite team right now.  The NHL media has jumped on the Matt Murray, Nazem Kadri and First Round Loss situations and had a field day ripping the Buds.

But keep this in mind: The Leafs don’t care. For the first time ever, they are running their team without the interference of the media.  They are sticking to their plan, and they are seemingly uninfluenced by (the honestly very stupid) criticism surrounding them.

The Toronto Maple Leafs Very Smart, Not Too Sexy Off-Season to Date

Sure, everyone wants an exciting move, but when you’re already among the best, there isn’t much you can do to get significantly better, especially when you already have most of your core players in place and locked up.

The Leafs have signed 2 x blue-liners who both figure to provide massive returns on their extremely team friendly deals (Giordano and Liljegren).

They fixed their goalie situation while somehow getting 2 x free draft picks. Sure, everyone, myself included, was hoping for a more reliable solution, but Sorokin, Binnington, Hellebuyck and Vasilevskiy were unavailable.   If you can’t have one of those guys, the math says spend as little as possible and bet on upside.

Mission accomplished.

The team that knew Jack Campbell best chose to go in a different direction with a goalie who has roughly the same cap hit.  I am not one to appeal to experts, but in this case, who would know better about whether to bet on Jack Campbell than the Leafs?

Most importantly, Mikheyev and Campbell and Lyubushkin were signed for a combined $12 million dollar cap hit.  Critics like to play it up like the Leafs couldn’t afford these players, but by their words and actions, the Leafs have made it beyond clear that they do not believe it is good business to extend low-upside, mid-range players.

Any cursory glance into the last five years of operations should make that clear.  More importantly, they’ve been a top team the entire time they’ve used this strategy, and even Tampa and Colorado are copping their moves now.

But the best part is all that cheap depth: Nicholas Aube-Kubel, Adam Gaudette, Denis Malgin, Jordie Benn and Victor Mete provide much the same bet they made last year with Bunting, Ritchie, Kampf, Kase etc.

You mix these guys in with Engvall, Kampf, Andersen, Abruzzese, Robertson, Steeves, Hironin, Holmberg etc. and the Toronto Maple Leafs have a ton of internal competition for their open roster positions, which is exactly what you want to see.

So while the Leafs have done nothing exciting, they have made several very smart moves, most of which have been completely ignored by the increasingly silly, unnuanced critics of the team.