6 Reasons Why the Maple Leafs Are Just An Average Team Looking to Get Lucky
The Toronto Maple Leafs lost game one, but were able to pull off a great victory last night.
Despite the victory, the Toronto Maple Leafs are not favored to win this series and they have a ridiculous path through the playoffs, since if they do beat Boston their reward is either Tampa or Florida, two of the other best teams in the NHL.
While there is always hope that any team that makes the playoffs can win the Stanley Cup, I don't think I'm alone in being disappointed that in year eight of the Auston Matthews Era, the Leafs are not one of the top teams in the NHL.
Not even their most biased pro-Leafs fan thinks they came into the playoffs as a Cup Favorite. Instead, in year eight of Auston Matthews career, the Leafs took a step back and their hopes for the Stanley Cup rested on the idea of getting lucky, and not much else.
The Leafs goaltending and blue-line is just not up to the standards of other Cup Contenders.
They don't have a mobile, puck-moving blue-line to compliment their high-scoring forwards, and they don't have a goalie they can count on They do have Auston Matthews, so the series is basically a coin-flip. The Leafs and Bruins are two solid but flawed teams.
Unfortunately, unless I am mistaken, defense and goaltending are considered the most important things in the playoffs, and the Leafs don't have either of those things.
From the get-go, Brad Treliving was a bad choice to replace Kyle Dubas. First, the Leafs had almost no interview process. Second, his previous team was a mess. Third, he had one of the worst summer's of any GM in the league, making several bone-headed signings and doing nothing to improve the team.
The Leafs entered the 2024 season with one of the worst blue-lines in the NHL, and that was before they knew how badly TJ Brodie would fall off.
During the season, they did nothing to improve. For months their defense was in tatters, and at times so was their goaltending. Treliving deserves some credit for being patient and not panic-adding someone he didn't necessarily need, but there comes a time when not panicking turns into neglegence, and he crossed that line sometime in January.
"Just wait till the trade deadline" we thought, but then while other teams were adding superstars and circumventing the salary cap, Treleving thought the best individual season in Toronto Maple Leafs history deserved only Joel Edmundson as help for the playoffs.
The Leafs finished the season as the top scoring 5v5 team and an average defensive team. They were 24th in 5v5 save-percentage, which is embarssing for a Cup Contending team in year 7 of it's window.
Whatever the playoff results end up being, we know the Leafs came into the first round as an underdog. That is unacceptable for a team in the seventh year of it's window of contention. Win or lose, the Leafs entered the Stanley Cup playoffs with the goal of getting lucky. They had no reasonable expectation of being the best team, and the best anyone could hope for is an unexpected run of goaltending from Samsonov or Woll combined with a dominant peformance from Auston Matthews.
But how did we get here? This should be a no-doubt top team. The best player in franchise history is having his best ever season and expectations should be higher than just the hope that they hit on a hail mary. (all stats naturalstattrick.com).
6 Reasons Why the Toronto Maple Leafs Are An Average Team Looking to Get Lucky
1. They Got Worse Defensively, On Purpose
They got rid of actual good defensive players like Alex Kerfoot and Pierre Engvall and replaced them with scorers like Domi and McMann.
I'm not against going with more offense, but this atypical of what teams usually do.
"Let's get worse defensively for next year's playoffs" is an unusual strategy but it's essentially what the Leafs did (they also got rid of Noel Acciari, Ryan O'Reilly and Sam Lafferty from what was truly an elite defensive bottom-six last year).
It's a fact that "boring" players like Engvall and Kerfoot - who don't hit and rarely score or make the highlights - are unpopular because they don't ever seem to do anything and often only really get noticed when they make errors.
But statistically, they are solid players who win their minutes and can play anywhere in the lineup. Contrast this to the kind of lineup juggling you have to do to make the very popular Max Domi effective and you can start to see why the Leafs are more popular but worse this year.
2. The Jusin Holl Factor
They got rid of Justin Holl and somehow got worse on defense.
That should not even be possible. They lost three of their top four from the start of last year as along with Holl, Muzzin was injured and Brodie has disintegrated.
I have written nearly every day since July 1st about how bizarre their approach to the blue-line has been and I give up trying to understand their thinking.
Where the Toronto Maple Leafs Went Wrong (Continued)
3. The Blue-Line Stinks
They have a very superficially defensive blue-line in that yeah, they're big and mean, but they also play in a way that forces the team to actually play more total defense by volume.
This blue-line is predictably bad at getting hemmed in their own zone. Of the Leafs nine NHL quality defenders, five of them (Benoit, Lyubushkin, Brodie, Giordano and Edmundson) are among the NHL's worst puck-moving defenseman.
4. The Composition of the Blue-Line Makes No Sense
The defense doesn't in anyway shape or form make sense from a team building perspective when compared to the forwards they have.
Instead of putting together a highly mobile puck-moving blue-line to compliment the NHL's best offence, like a sane person would have done, the Leafs - AS THEY HAVE DONE EVERY SINGLE YEAR WITH NO SUCCESS WHATSOEVER - refused yet again to lean into their strengths and have, for the umpteenth time, loaded their roster with the grizzled playoff warrior types who do not actually have anywhere close to the positive effect on the outcome that their magical-thinking benefactors assume them to have.
Over the years we've seen Luke Schenn, Zach Bogosian, Ilya Lyubushkin, Nick Foligno, Brian Boyle, Tomas Plecanek, Kyle Clifford, Wayne Simmonds, Ben Hutton, Noah Acciari, Sam Lafferty etc.
You can add Connor Dewar, Lyubushkin (again) and Joel Edmundson to this list.
Every single year they look at the thing they do better than anyone else - scoring - and act like they're allergic to it, "Defense wins in the playoffs". they say, so every year they completely change their play style to what they think a playoff team shoudl do and it never works.
It is optimal strategy to lean into what you're good at. It's better to be great at something than average at a bunch of things.
Where the Toronto Maple Leafs Went Wrong (Continued)
5. Ilya Samsonov
They saw how bad their goaltending was in last year's playoffs, didn't sign Ilya Samsonov to a contract extention , but instead took him to arbitration.
They signed him for one year and within three months he was on waivers.
The Leafs have been goalied multiple times during their current window of Cup Contention, but they have never had a goalie capable of stealing a series for them.
At the trade dealine, the Leafs were one of the hottest teams in the league and had only league average goaltending during that streak, which should have told them what their potential was with a star goalie.
It remains amazing to me that no one has thought to combine the skills of Auston Matthews with one of the best goalies in the world.
There are five pretty clearly above everyone else: Connor Hellebuyck, Jusse Saros, Ilya Sorokin, Igor Shesterkin and Joel Oettinger. The Leafs should have tried harder to acquire one of those guys, even if the cost was Nylander or Marner.
6. The Trade Deadline
They didn't do anything to augment their roster at the trade deadline, and outside of Tyler Bertuzzi (who did not equal what Michael Bunting brought for 900K) the new GM wasted the $20 million he had to spend last summer.
Honestly, as someone who has been a fan of this team for his entire life, I felt ripped off that they didn't do more to try and win at this year's trade deadline.
I don't want to believe this, because I think it's way too cynical, but the only explanation I can think of to having a 70 goal scorer and doing nothing but adding Joel Edmundson is that they figured they might get lucky but that if they lost Kyle Dubas would take the blame, and therefore it was wise to hold their assets for next year when they could take all the glory for themselvfes.
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Whatever their motivation, it was a pretty stupid move to just sit back and enter the playoffs with their current goalies and defensemen, I hope the Leafs win the Stanley Cup, but at this point in the team-building process they should be a top team with a juggernaut roster, not an average team hoping to get lucky.