The Toronto Maple Leafs have had a horrible summer.
There is optimism because the Toronto Maple Leafs still have a pretty good team, but to say that things have gone off the rails would be a massive understatement.
Everything looked good in April when the Leafs beat Tampa, but everything since then has been lame, dumb, or both.
Here is a re-cap of what’s been happening, and our opinion on each move as we re-cap the off-season so far.
The Toronto Maple Leafs Terrible, No Good, Horrible Off-Season In Review
May 13: Leafs eliminated by Florida. Rating: 0/10
May 14: Lazy media foists bizarre narratives about effort, toughness, defense, cap allocation, top-heavy roster etc. when, in reality, the Leafs lost because they couldn’t score, mostly because they ran into a hot goalie. It happens. 1/10
May 15: Duabs goes full Emo at a press conference and gets himself fired. This was the personal equivalent of dressing Luke Schenn on the top pairing in the playoffs. 1/10 (The one is for entertainment value).
May 23: Shanahan Fires Dubas, leaves Keefe in the wind and barely bothers to look for a new GM, settling for the first stray GM to cross his path. This will probably go down as the dumbest move in the history of a franchise known for constantly making dumb moves. 0/10. If you’re a Leafs fan, the wrong guy won the power struggle.
May 31: As everyone who cares expected since hearing Dubas was fired, the Toronto Maple Leafs sign a generic hockey guy to run team. Fans complain that you can’t picture what he looks like unless you’re staring right at him. 2/10 – at least he wasn’t Peter Chiarelli.
May 31-June 27 Team goes dormant. Presumably they were working on a plan, but subsequent moves do not support this theory. 10/10 because not making moves is where the Toronto Maple Leafs shine.
June 28 – In his first move, Treliving poses as a magician who claims to be able to make cap space disappear. He more than doubles what you should be paying replacement level David Kampf and while this signing is horrible, the trick works and the cap space is gone. 1/10. Bad move but I’ve seen worse.
June 29 – Leafs give a one-way deal to Pontus Holberg, which is fine until you realize they are telling us their bottom-six will be centred by a Kampf-Holmberg combo that costs $3.2 million dollars. Yikes. 5/10 because at least like Holmberg sticking around.
July 1st/2nd – As if we didn’t believe him about the cap space disappearing trick, Treliving spends $8.5 million on Max Domi, John Klingberg and Ryan Reaves. This inexplicably bad cap management is then praised by the same people who complain about the likes of Marner and Tavares making slightly too much money. 0/10 – The salary cap honestly isn’t that complicated -you make your bets on star players and underpay everyone else. It’s been almost 20 years, come on.
In case it’s unclear, all three of these signings weren’t just bad, but actively dumb. In a salary cap league, you must spend money on stars and stars only. All money spent on mid-range players is a bad investment that cannot possibly provide value.
July 1st/2nd – Ryan O’Reilly, Luke Schenn, Justin Holl, Noel Acciari, Erik Gustufsson, Erik Kallgren, Alex Kerfoot and Michael Bunting sign elsewhere. Letting other teams overpay for these players is about the only thing Brad Treliving has gotten right so far. 10/10 again, by doing nothing, the Leafs make out great.
July 2nd – The Leafs sign Tyler Bertuzzi. This is a reasonable deal for a good player at a fair price. No complaints here. 7/10. Solid move.
Today: The Toronto Maple Leafs currently sit $3+ million over the salary cap, without a starting goalie, and without a number-one defenseman. They have not re-signed William Nylander or Auston Matthews. 0/10 – It’s hard to picture the Leafs off-season going any worse than it has.