The Toronto Maple Leafs Top 5 Mistakes of the Summer

Toronto Maple Leafs Top 5 Worst Moves of the Summer: Sheldon Keefe

The irony of the Leafs summer is that if they had kept Kyle Dubas, as was their plan and first choice, they would have probably had to fire their GM’s good friend.

The Toronto Maple Leafs were in need of a big change, and if Dubas returned, I feel reasonably confident in my guess that that change would have taken the form of a new coach.

There were a lot of good choices, and I would have picked Claude Julien if it were up to me.

Big surprise however – it’s not!

The Leafs decided to keep Keefe in a transparent attempt to have a mid-season bullet.

Maybe we’re just a bunch of cynical jerks (or maybe the Leafs are) but if you watch sports at all, you know that new GMs inevitably want to hire their own coach.

But they also always have to fire that coach to save their own butt.

If you keep the incumbent, you can fire him unceremoniously the first time things go awry and get yourself a second-bullet.

If Sheldon Keefe makes it all the way through the next Toronto Maple Leafs season, you can bet they’re competing for the President’s Trophy.   If not, expect him gone at the first sign of trouble.

Not only do I hate this transparent move, but I don’t like Keefe as a coach either.

He makes weird decisions, doesn’t trust young players, and doesn’t take advantage of his high-flying roster enough for my tastes.  This isn’t to say he hasn’t done a good job, just that I’m not a huge fan and this was an easy way to change up the team.

William Nylander and Auston Matthews

The NHL is a star-driven league, just as much as the NBA.

The Toronto Maple Leafs used to know this.

This summer, they had one job – sign their two pending free-agents and keep them with the team long-term.

Now we’re hearing about three-year deals for Matthews, and rumours about playing hardball with Nylander?

Uncool.

Just shut up and pay the guys who stir the drink.

Nylander scored 40 goals as the third or fourth best option on the team. He’s an elite player with room to grow.

Matthews is Matthews, no argument needed.  He’s the best player in franchise history.

A sensible plan would be to just pay them both and move on.  Get it done without any drama.

Does Matthews want to be the highest paid player in the NHL?  Good for him, make it happen.

What’s it gonna take to get his name on an eight-year deal?  Just ask him, then do whatever he says.  It’s easy.

Same with Nylander. As we have seen with Alex Debrincat, trading him is a dumb idea that only a very bad GM would even be considering at this point.

He want’s ten million?

Give it to him.  He’s worth it.  The fact that we are approaching August without either player signed is an embarrassment to the organization and an indictment of the new GM.

Going to Arbitration

Goaltending is a position based on confidence.

Therefore, it’s probably a bad idea to go into a room and argue to his face why your goalie isn’t worth the raise he wants.

It’s also a bad idea to let an arbitrator decide how much your starting goalie gets paid.

It’s also a bad idea to move on from the league-leader in high-danger save-percentage.

Sure, you don’t want to overpay a goalie long-term, but there is nothing wrong with giving him a bit of an overpayment if the deal is for just  a single year.

Playing hardball with your starting goalie is risky and what is the point?  Especially when you’ve already shown you’ll overpay players like a drunken sailor on payday.

If the Toronto Maple Leafs didn’t want Ilya Samsonov, they could have named Joseph Woll starter, used Matt Murray as best they could and picked up a draft pick for the group 2 free-agent.

Either sign the guy or trade him, but the last thing you want to do is take him to arbitration.

Such a bad idea it’s crazy it’s only the third worst thing they did this summer.

That’s right – there are two things the Toronto Maple Leafs did this summer worse than taking their star goalie to arbitration.  That alone is mindblowing, but at least only one of them can be blamed on their new GM.

Wasting Cap Space

While it’s hard to believe that the Toronto Maple Leafs actually made a worse move than going to arbitration with their starting goalie, they actually made two of them.

The second worst move of the summer was the combined $11 million dollars of wasted cap space they handed out in free-agency.

While letting the majority of their RFAs walk in free-agency was a solid move, the players they signed ruined any progress letting the likes or O’Reilly, Schenn and Bunting go made.

The Leafs should have just promoted young players and waited until March to make moves, but it seems incoming general manager Brad Treliving was desperate to put his own stamp on the team.

John Klingberg got $4.15 million. 

Max Domi got $3 million.

David Kampf recieved $2.4, and finally, Ryan Reaves received an egregious $1.35.

Combined it’s $10.9 million for four players who likely won’t be any better than replacement players the Leafs could have called up from the AHL.

If the Leafs had of just promoted Roni Hirvonen, Topi Niemela, Alex Steeves and Nick Abruzzese they would have been able to sign Ilya Samsonov and have money left over for the trade deadline.

If any of those players struggled, the Leafs would have Bobby McCann, Nick Robertson, Ty Voit and Fraser Minten to audition.  Who they used doesn’t matter – the extra cap space is worth more than anything you can hope to get out of Domi or Klingberg.

As for Ryan Reaves, it’s such a stupid signing that it’s indefensible.

Instead of playing it cool and learning about what they might already have, they committed to playing players who might be worse than guys now stranded in the AHL.

They signed a whole slew of depth players for over twice what they could have paid, and are now forced to trade TJ Brodie or William Nylander to get under the cap.

This is a horrendous move that is indefensible.  The results might turn out OK – there’s always a chance. But this is about process, not results.  If you always follow the right process, you’re protected from bad luck because over time you will come out ahead.

But this isn’t the right process.  This is Old Hockey Guy 101.  This is overpaying for name-brand players with limited upside.   And it’s why the #1 worst thing the Leafs did is so obvious.

The Toronto Maple Leafs Worst Move of the Summer

You don’t give a guy five years of on-the-job training and then let him go to your competition for free.

Or, in this case, that’s exactly what you do.  But you shouldn’t.

The tenure of Kyle Dubas wasn’t perfect, but even when things worked out poorly (Alex Kerfoot for Nazem Kadri, the contracts handed out to the Big Four) you could at least look at the  process behind the moves and be happy with it.

Kadri was traded for a player who scored at a similar rate 5v5 and offered way better defense, who was young, more versatile, and cheaper.

No one could have foreseen Kadri’s big breakout.  And Kerfoot had a ton of upside he never really lived up to.  End of the day, you’d like to have that one back, but at least you can understand what the thinking was behind the move.

Compare that to blowing $11 million on four replacement players and the contrast between how well the team was run and how generically they’re run now is stark.

We already talked about the contracts, but its worth mentioning that despite those deals, the Leafs were a top three team over nearly 300 regular season games spanning four seasons, and that they were legit Cup Contenders each season.

Had Covid not frozen the salary cap, the Leafs would have been a top 3 team over 300 games with a ton of cap space.   The thought is cold comfort, but it does illustrate that the Kyle Dubas Era deserves a major * because of Covid.

I didn’t like all of Kyle Dubas’ moves, but what I did like was the fact that my favorite team recognized the obvious shortcomings of the classic/cliché NHL way of doing things and tried to be smarter.

How you should manage the salary cap isn’t up for debate – the math is quite clear – it’s how the Kyle Dubas did it.  You should avoid paying depth and role players, and you should try to only pay stars.

When you draft, you should draft for skill and intelligence – things you can’t teach.

When you make a trade, you should bet on youth and upside.  There are lots of things I don’t like about Dubas (I think he’s smug, I think he relies too heavily on people and plyers he already knows, I think he overthinks things sometime, I think he’s risk adverse, and under his direction the Leafs often blocked young players from having a chance to make the NHL).

I would have been fine if the Toronto Maple Leafs had of changed GMs, but what I hate is that they seem to have abandoned everything that made their team great over the last few years by going with a traditional “hockey guy.”

Kyle Dubas was about to be re-signed when Brendan Shanahan won a power-struggle for control of the Leafs. Subsequent days have shown that the wrong man won the struggle, and that the Leafs would have been so much better off under President and General Manager Kyle Dubas.