Toronto Maple Leafs fans are angry and have been looking back at two specific moves as to why this team has struggled in the playoffs for the past decade, but it's unfair.
The Toronto Maple Leafs season ended sadly and now that the Florida Panthers are one game away from sweeping the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Finals. Tied 0-0 with 40 minutes to play in Game 7, if things went differently, it could have been the Leafs that were on the verge of sweeping the Hurricanes, who are now 0-15 in their last 15 Conference Finals games.
As much as it's easy to look at what has transpired in the Florida/Carolina series and think that the Leafs would have walked their way to the Stanley Cup Finals, that can't be further from the truth. The Panthers are the defending Stanley Cup champions, have gone to back-to-back Finals and are simply, just way better than the Leafs and Hurricanes.
We always favour the team that has home-ice advantage, which is what Toronto and Carolina both had against Florida, but if you look past each team's regular season record, it's easy to see that Florida is built to perfection. They have a Vezina Trophy winning goalie in Sergei Bobrovsky, three world-class defenseman in Gustav Forsling, Aaron Ekblad and Seth Jones, and amazing talent up-front in Alxander Barkov, Sam Reinhart, Carter Verhaeghe, Sam Bennett, Matthew Tkachuk and Brad Marchand, who's playing on the third line.
That line-up is just way better than the Leafs and the fact that Toronto made it to Game 7 against them is pretty impressive, especially when most of their roster didn't show up. Even if you added a few more pieces, I still think that same result would have happened in Game 7, because as we've seen for years, the core of the Leafs doesn't show up in the biggest moments, while Florida's does.
So let's go back to my original point about the criticism of this team and talk about a few former Leafs who supposedly would have made this team way better. Zach Hyman and Nazem Kadri's names have continued to be mentioned over the past few weeks, not only because they are solid playoff performers, but because their cap-hit combines for less than Auston Matthews.
Leafs keeping Kadri and Hyman was always a pipedream
Despite being a three-time Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy winner, he has never scored as many goals in a playoff-run than Kadri and Hyman. Matthews' most goals he ever scored in a playoff-run was five goals, while Kadri scored nine in 2020 and Hyman scored 16 (!!) in 2024.
Although the Leafs could have desperately used both Kadri and Hyman over the past few years, they never would have performed that great on Toronto, and we all know it. Kadri was able to slip in perfectly in Colorado and be the fifth-wheel to Nathan MacKinnion, Cale Makar, Gabriel Landeskog and Mikko Rantanen, while Hyman has the biggest benefit in the world playing with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. By playing on team's with real playoff performers, they have shined, but they never would have been given that opportunity in Toronto.
Hyman and Kadri are two amazing players and I would want them on my team every day, but unfortunately the Leafs were never going to walk away from the core-four and allow Kadri and Hyman to shine in Toronto, so as much as we can look back and be upset, the team was never going to move on from Mitch Marner in exchange for Hyman or Kadri.
Essentially what it all boils down to is that the Leafs core is broken and in order for the rest of the group around them to soar, they need to be broken up. I can sympathize with the fanbase that keeping Kadri/Hyman over Marner, Matthews, Tavares and/or Nylander may have helped bolt this team into a Conference Finals, but it was never going to happen under this management.
Kadri and Hyman have been the beneficiarys of playing on teams where the best players get even better in the playoffs, which is the opposite of what happens in Toronto. They've found their role perfectly in Edmonton and formerly in Colorado, but that never would have happened in Toronto, as this team was only going to go as far as the core took them.