The Secret and Impossible to Articulate Success of the Toronto Maple Leafs

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a weird team to evaluate because the team has not even made it to the Stanley Cup Final since the NHL expanded beyond six teams, and hold just about the longest streak without a championship in professional sports.

The Toronto Maple Leafs streak of bad luck and failure has made it all but impossible to evaluate them fairly. What I mean by that is that there is obviously room for analysis of hockey teams beyond just who wins the Stanley Cup; if there wasn't, the scores would be all we needed.

Clearly, even though people love to hate the Leafs, the very existence of this site and others gives lie to the idea that only Championships matter. But fairly evaluating all that losing in this context can be very hard.

If you don't believe me, just try publicly defending ex-Leafs GM Kyle Dubas sometime. Dubas attempted to innovate in an industry that is extremely hostile to innovation, and because he didn't actually win, his time with the Leafs is seen - at least somewhat and by many, if not most, people - as a failure.

The Secret and Impossible to Articulate Success of the Toronto Maple Leafs

I don't really think this viewpoint is fair when you consider that the NHL Playoffs are filled with variance and that a salary cap keeps teams *in theory anyways* from being drastically different from each other. In fact, I think Kyle Dubas is the best GM the Leafs have ever had. I think Brendan Shanahan has been wildly successful and that he could easily be seen as the best executive in hockey if he did nothing different, but a few things just fell his way.

Clearly, on a macro-level, any individual can understand that things like going 0-11 in elimination game or Mitch Marner going 18 playoff games without a goal, constantly running into insanely hot goalies, Auston Matthews being injured in three of the last four playoff season, or Joseph Woll getting hurt before game 7 are just bad luck.

Like, no team good enough to make the playoffs and force every series to seven games could be so bad as to lose 11 games in a row if they tried to. It's just a randomness. It sucks, and Kyle Dubas' reputation is all the worse for it, but also, any sane person can understand just how ridiculously unlucky it was.

So, in my opinion, we should be evaluating the Leafs based on these kinds of things, and not just assume that the team is incompetent or that all their ideas since hiring Brendan Shanahan were bad because they have not won. I get winning is the point, but that kind of binary is just so..........frustrating and dumb. For example, Covid forced them to compete for four years without the salary cap going up, but when they signed all of their big contracts, essentially on the eve of a world wide pandemic it turns out, everyone assumed that a new TV Deal, Expansion and Gambling were going to send the cap skyrocketing. That didn't happen to any other team. Just the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Everyone just seems to assume that signing those four forwards was incredibly stupid, but the Leafs actually competed and had to get incredibly unlucky in order to not win a Cup during those four years.

The very fact that the Leafs signed those deals with the expectation of 20% more cap space and then didn't get it, but still competed anyways, is quite impressive. It shows that they were right to use the Studs and Duds style of roster building.

But I'm getting off-topic. I just wanted to illustrate the difficulty of evaluating a team that constantly loses, and whose fans seem to be on the precipice of revolt, but who is, in reality, going through arguably the most successful period in their history. Ironically, the Leafs overreacted to Dubas bad luck by over-compensating with the most beige, traditional Hockey Man they could have hired.

In the last year, the Leafs have been run like a hybrid of Dubas' good ideas (they're stuck with the contracts) and the kind of dumb but traditional moves most teams would make in an insane attempt to "fix" things by paying name-brand formerly good players like Oliver Ekman Larsson way too much money.

Nothing could have been funnier - if I wasn't such a huge fan, that is - than the team loading up on defensive defenseman only to totally flop.

If you look at everything other than the results, which we know, for an indisputable fact, are more governed by luck, injuries and variance than skill, then the Toronto Maple Leafs have been extremely successful franchise for the last seven or so years.

The irony is that people only care about results, and so by normal standards, they are an absolute failure.