The 3 biggest problems facing the Toronto Maple Leafs
The Roster Is Stale
The Toronto Maple Leafs current general manager and President are in a bit of a pickle. Essentially, they have to prove to new MLSE President Keith Pelley that they should keep their respective jobs, which pretty much means making it to the Conference Finals, at the very least, but they don't have the cap space or assets to make any major moves without doing major surgery to the roster in-season, and they don't have a good enough team to win as is.
Basically they are in a win-or-else situation and seem to have bet everything on whatever Chris Tanev and some minor trade deadline additions can do for them.
That isn't going to go well, however, because their roster is stale. This team has been together for nearly a decade, and given the Pandemic, it somehow feels like longer. The combination of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, Morgan Rielly and John Tavares has run its course.
Tavares isn't the captain. Rielly has lost a step. Marner's living a hometown nightmare where he somehow takes the blame for everything he can't do + everything the other four have failed to deliver on. Auston Matthews and William Nylander are great but they need to be re-energized.
The team looks stale, and getting a hard-ass coach to play a "north-south" game sounds good on paper, but what this team needs is to let the horses out of the stable. Matthews and Company need to fly high and soar like eagles, not dump pucks in at the blue-line and take shots from anywhere.
Doesn't anyone anywhere think a team with this much talent should score off the rush a little more? That they should look a little more dynamic than they do?
What is this team's identify? It honestly seems like no one cares about the regular season, and that the team is in a purgatory just waiting to be put out of its misery.
A stale roster is a problem and its clearly going to take more than a coaching change to fix it.