The Toronto Maple Leafs Are Awesome: What Is Everyone So Mad About?
Think back to the Toronto Maple Leafs 2011-12 season.
This is the year before the lockout. It's Christmas Time and Ron Wilson is the coach. The Toronto Maple Leafs are playing the Jets and getting destroyed and Ron looks like he's going to explode.
The idea of building a team around Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf is becoming increasingly ridiculous. The team looks lethargic, uninterested and dead in the water. Wilson would hang on until March, but it was clear the team wasn't going to do anything with him at the helm.
Every time I get frustrated with the current Leafs team, I think about how Wilson looked that night.
That year, the seventh straight without the playoffs, came to a merciful end in April, and didn't play another game until after the lockout ended in January.
The NHL had 2 Strikes/Lockouts and in between the Leafs played zero playoff games.
The lockout ended, but the Leafs kept on being garbage until they finished dead last and drafted Auston Matthews.
The Leafs played one playoff series across 11 years. The best year between 2004 and 2016 was the one where they finished dead last.
But that didn't happen by accident. That happened because of two men - Brendan Shanahan and Kyle Dubas, who was the interim GM who traded Kessel to Pittsburgh and made Auston Matthews a possibility.
The Toronto Maple Leafs Are Awesome: What Is Everyone So Mad About?
Since the day that the Leafs drafted Auston Matthews, they have made the playoffs in every single season.
After playing just one single series between 2004 and 2016, I think that is pretty damned good.
Everyone says "oh it's been eight years, they just can't win" but did they forget about the "Five Year Rebuild?" You know, the thing said so often about rebuilding teams that it is a cliche?
It is accepted practice that it takes five years to build a contender from scratch. The Leafs happened to make the playoffs in year one of their rebuild. That was great then, not so much now since everyone uses that period to make this current one sound so much worse than it is.
The Leafs lost their third series as a True Contender this season. The five years between 2016 and 2021 shouldn't count against them, as they were a young team that was learning.
If, like Colorado, they had struggled to make the playoffs during the rebuilding years, the Leafs would get more leeway and credit right now for how good they are.
But I also Have another point I'd like to make:
Winning Isn't Everything
Yeah I know, we've all been trained to think Stanley Cup or bust. But the real fun in watching hockey comes from knowing how hard and random it is to win the Stanley Cup.
Even if you avoid injuries and tough matchups (like say playing in the Atlantic Division and having to play the eventual Cup Finalist pretty much every year in the first round) there are goalies.
Goalies are unpredictable and yet control the entire outcome of games, series and careers. As the Leafs know, any random Sergei Bobrovsky or Jonas Korpisalo can come at you with a spell of invincibility.
And though excuses are lame, they are also called "reasons" and sometimes you can't help it. Should the team have found a way to just win no matter what? Sure. I wish they did.
But the fact that the NHL is so random and has such high variance should allow us a little bit of leeway in the all-or-nothing approach.
The crazy thing about this off-season is reading everyone rage-tweet when I think the last 8 years of Leafs Hockey have been absolutely awesome and amazing.
— Editor in Leaf (@EditorinLeaf) May 21, 2024
Its the most successful period in the last 50 years of franchise history.
Being a top team is nothing to sneer at. The Leafs were bad for so long, and I loved them so much, that I literally spent half of my life watching them without any real hope.
At least for the last eight years there was always a chance they would win the Cup. For the last eight years they have given us more good hockey than every single person under 50 in the entire fanbase has seen over their entire life.
That's not everything we want or expect, but it's not nothing. The journey has been fun, and winning will be all the sweeter for having struggled to achieve it.
Brendan Shanahan can't control the weather. He can't decide who gets injured or what team the Leafs will play in the opening round. He can't put them in an easier division or prevent just absolutely mathematically mind boggling things like losing 11 straight elimination games or Mitch Marner going 18 games without a goal in the playoffs.
By the standards of literrelly everyone else who has tried, Brendan Shanahan has done an exemplary job. Even without more playoff victories this has been the best period in franchise history, at least since the NHL expanded beyond six teams.
I sit here and read all day about how much Marner sucks and how the Leafs have to move on from one of the best players to ever wear the uniform and I'm shocked. Do we not remember the dark years? Haven't the Shanahan Years been kind of awesome?
Not perfect, no. But pretty freaking great. Annually competitive and gifted with the chance to watch Marner and Matthews every night.
I think it's been a great era. And not only can I not stand the negativity of people who complain that Marner sucks but won't give him the benefit of the doubt regarding playing on one ankle, and who don't factor in such things as having a starting goalie who was on waivers in January, but I don't respect it either.
When things don't work, you try again. When you fail, you get back up. You don't quit, whine about it and trade your best players in a fit of pique.
Leafs Nation, you have to stop being so thin-skinned. Yeah, you lost again. Deal with it. The Colorado Avalanche didn't win until year nine of Nathan MacKinnon. The Oilers are in year nine of Connor McDavid. The Capitals didn't win until Ovechkin had played 13 seasons.
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Stop blaming all your problems on Mitch Marner, stop being bad at math, and relax. This team is fun. It's a joy and a privilege to get to watch them. And if you don't agree, think back to that game at Christmas time against the Jets when Ron Wilson looked like he was going to explode.
I for one remain extremely optimistic about not only the Toronto Maple Leafs, but this exact version of them.