For the Toronto Maple Leafs, it’s time to panic.
The 2023-24 season is off to a horrendous start. The Toronto Maple Leafs summer move’s have blown up in their face, and from the GM right down to the superstars and the coach, nothing is going right.
Except for William Nylander, who is playing at the best level of his career, the rest of the team is playing below expectations, likely because the roster is horribly unbalanced and the blue-line is garbage.
The game against LA last night was a disgusting performance from a supposed contender.
So far, the Leafs are 5-3-1. But take away the two extremely lucky come-from-two-goals-behind-to-win games, and the two games Joseph Woll stole, and you’re looking at a team whose record could very easily be 1-7-1.
Things are not looking good.
Toronto Maple Leafs: Time to Panic
To a man, all of the signings that Brad Treliving made in the summer are working out poorly. The best one, Bertuzzi, has decent peripheral numbers, but basically zero production.
The rest are an unmitigated disaster.
Ryan Reaves is not an NHL player.
John Klingberg is not an NHL player.
David Kampf should not be playing on a contender.
Max Domi, if he is an NHL player, isn’t a very good one.
And the coach is terrible.
His best defenseman does not get the most minutes (that’d be Timothy Liljegren).
He keeps playing Calle Jarnkrok on the first line. Auston Matthews has been completely invisible since they were paired together.
The Knies-Kampf-Domi line is the worst combination of players in the history of the NHL. The Leafs are wasting Knies’ talents on a third line that has two completely opposite one dimensional players.
And the fourth line, last night, had a 0% Expected Goals Rating. Ryan Reaves is the worst player to ever get a regular shift on the Leafs since they’ve been competitive and signing him to a 3 Year Deal was one of the biggest bone-head moves in the history of a franchise that has bordered on being a complete joke for the better part of it’s 100 year existence.
So no, it is not early.
Yes, it is time to panic.
If Shanahan had any guts, he’d say he made a bad choice and fire Trelving. But, that is never going to happen.
Treliving could fire Keefe, but it would make him look like an idiot.
So what’s left? A panic trade at the worst possible time, during a time of the year when there are hardly ever any trades of significance?
And do you really even want the guy who signed Max Domi and John Klingberg and Ryan Reaves making trades?
This is an absolute disaster.
The new GM appears to be incompetent. He has two teams in a 32 team league with his fingerprints on them and they both look awful.
The Coach looks bad, and the team has no depth and can’t even put together a sensible lineup because the GM appears to have Frankensteined a bunch of ill-fitting parts together.
The bottom six can’t score and gets routinely destroyed. Worse, two of the three goals they have scored this year come from a guy who needs to be moved to the top line.
You cannot consistently win hockey games if your team loses whenever it’s 3rd and 4th lines are deployed.
Worst costume I saw yesterday?
— Editor in Leaf (@EditorinLeaf) November 1, 2023
Ryan Reaves going out as an NHL Player.
You cannot win with a goalie who has no confidence and a rookie goalie playing behind one of the league’s worst blue-lines.
And speaking of that blue-line, it’s too old, too slow, has no upside and has at least three players on it who likely shouldn’t even be in the NHL right now.
Whatever happens, let it be known that all this was easily predictable from day one. But no one would listen because they wanted to give the new GM a chance, even though everything he did was obviously stupid from day one.
Ryan Reaves? Are you $$$$$$$$ kidding me?
Time to do something, anything. It’s November 1st and they are already so far behind Boston it will take a miracle to win the division.