Better luck next year: The Toronto Maple Leafs can not avoid making changes this time
The time has come. Something needs to change with this core group.
Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be officially eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Toronto Maple Leafs.
In most cases I hate automatically pointing the finger at a team’s best players when they fall short in the playoffs and calling for changes with them.
It is usually (but not always) just plucking the lowest hanging fruit off the tree and is the type of stuff that is usually reserved for talk radio and the Facebook comments on a team’s official page. There is rarely any serious objective analysis behind it beyond “you make the most money, so you take the blame.”
That is not to say a team’s best players can’t be responsible for a loss. They can be. It’s just that sometimes the focus goes automatically right at them when there might be other variables at play. Usually there are.
But with this Toronto Maple Leafs team? After another first round exit and offensive no-show in the playoffs? It is time to officially acknowledge the ship has sailed with this group and that it has gone as far as it can take them.
With their Game 7 loss in Boston on Saturday night, the Maple Leafs were eliminated in the first round for the seventh time in eight years and are once again not even close to reaching the Stanley Cup Final, let alone winning it.
Until now, the Maple Leafs have mostly avoided making significant changes to the roster.
The depth players have changed, and they have to tried to shuffle in different third-and fourth-lines and defense pairs with a revolving door of goalies, but the main glue of this team has mostly remained untouched.
They have only tried two head coaches during this stretch, and the coaching change that did happen five years ago seemed to have almost as much to do with Mike Babcock’s perpetual toxicity as much as it did with his shortcomings in the playoffs.
The only *core* player they traded was Nazem Kadri, and even that was five years ago.
But how long can you keep ignoring the results and keep writing it off as bad luck?
Three or four first round losses? That happens. No matter how good your team is sometimes you are just not going to win. The great teams of this era (Pittsburgh, Chicago, Tampa Bay, Colorado) have all had their share of first round defeats.
Maybe you run into a hot goalie or two in a couple of seasons.
Maybe the puck luck isn’t on your side one or two times.
Almost every single year though? Seven times in eight years? At this point it is no longer just luck not going your way and the bounces going against you. At some point you have to do something. As Bill Parcells once said, you are what your record says you are. And at this point with the Maple Leafs they are what they keep telling us and showing us they are.
They have lost as favorites. They have lost as underdogs. They have lost multiple game leads. They have come back from deficits and lost winner-take-all games (literally all of them). They have lost because of goaltending. They have lost because they can’t score. The end result is always the same — losing.
The thing that has to stand out here is that not only are they losing in the playoffs, they are not even getting close to the Stanley Cup. A championship simply does not seem inevitable with this group the way it did even with Washington, Tampa Bay or Colorado before their breakthroughs and championships eventually came. Tampa Bay was always in the Eastern Conference Final and a Stanley Cup Final before finally winning it all. Washington and Colorado would consistently get to the second round, and with the Capitals it was pretty obvious they just had one nemesis (Pittsburgh) they could not get through. The Capitals were also consistently winning divisions and finishing with the league’s best record.
You could see it happening for those teams.
But the Maple Leafs? Only one trip out of the first round. The most playoff wins this group has won in a single postseason is five, which is only 30 percent of the way to a Stanley Cup. That is their high water mark.
It is not like they have overly impressive regular season performances to fall back on, either.
Sure, they have been good, but they have rarely been among the league’s absolute best teams in any individual season. This particular team had the 10th best record in the NHL. Their only division championship came in 2020-21 in a 56-game season where they played in a makeshift, Frankenstein division with only the other Canadian teams competing against them.
Their average divisional finish over this stretch is 2.5, with the majority of their finishes (five out of eight) being third place.
Their average finish in the league standings is eighth.
Again, that is a good team. Maybe even a very good team. But that is their ceiling and you can’t keep ignoring it no matter how many points their core players pile up, how big their contracts are or how much star power they have.
There is more than enough evidence to believe a coaching change not only could happen, but also should happen. But the changes can not end there.
Let’s talk about it.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Adam's Sports Stuff to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.