Better luck next year: The Toronto Maple Leafs core has failed.

They can not keep doing this. It's over. Move on.

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 eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Toronto Maple Leafs. We are now into the playoff teams.

The problem with the Toronto Maple Leafs and their core-four group of forwards isn’t that they haven’t won a Stanley Cup by now.

That is understandable. It is forgivable. No team, no matter how talented or expensive, is guaranteed a championship in any 10-year window. Championships are hard and require equal parts skill, talent, production, coaching and luck, with the latter part being far more important than anybody will ever care to admit. You’re not winning a championship in any sport without a crazy amount of luck along the way, and it can come in many different forms.

The Maple Leafs not having all of those pieces fall together in any one season isn’t necessarily a problem.

The problem with the Maple Leafs is that they are not even getting close to it.

This year’s postseason is the furthest they have gone in the Auston Matthews-Match Marner-John Tavares-William Nylander era and all it produced was seven playoff wins.

It takes 16 wins in the playoffs to lift the Stanley Cup.

Seven wins is not even halfway there. It’s only 40 percent of the way to a Cup. Their fans can’t even sing along to the Bon Jovi song.

And this is the BEST they have done.

Prior to this the best was five playoffs wins. That’s only 31 percent of the way there.

Other than that, they’ve never won more than three games (that’s less than 20 percent of the way to a Cup).

Since the start of the 2016-17 NHL season — when this run of Maple Leafs playoffs appearances began — 21 different franchises have at least gotten halfway to a Stanley Cup with at least eight wins (meaning a Conference Final appearance) in a single postseason.

The Maple Leafs are not among them.

When you consider the fact they have consistently been a top-10 regular season team in the standings, and the talent they have at the top of the lineup, and the financial investment they have made in the roster, and the trade assets they have spent (especially this season) to try and strengthen it, that is the completely unacceptable part.

Everybody has to own it.

If you dig down through every individual postseason failure you can probably find some ways to justify a lot of them on their own.

In 2016-17 they were a young upstart team with no playoff experience going against a veteran Washington Capitals team. Some of those Boston and Tampa Bay teams were simply better. Columbus in the bubble was just a weird season where weird shit was happening. Montreal had Carey Price. Game 7s can be a coin flip sometimes.

You can come up with a lot of different reasons. But after this many seasons, and with this many failures in the exact same manner, the reasons stop being reasons and start becoming excuses. You’re not just getting unlucky nine years in a row against a wide array of opponents.

They’ve changed a lot during that time, including general managers, head coaches, complementary players and their overall approaches on the ice.

The only things that have remained the same are the core group at the top of the roster (Matthews, Marner, Tavares and Nylander) and the results.

The Maple Leafs have put off making changes to the core group long enough, trying to run it back every season in the hopes that they might finally get the recipe right.

They haven’t. And now they might not have a choice but to change it.

There are always a lot of narratives and questions regarding the Maple Leafs that people going back to when it comes to the playoffs.

Do they have enough defense?

Is the goaltending good enough?

Are they tough enough?

Do they play a playoff style?

At different times some of those narratives and questions have been very valid, and perhaps even accurate.

But there is another consistent problem that keeps happening every postseason, and especially as the games get tougher in crunch time and deeper into a series.

They can’t score.

They don’t score.

They won’t score.

It’s not just that they see a regression from their regular season offensive production when the playoffs begin.

It’s that they become downright bad offensively.

Since the start of the 2016-17 season the Maple Leafs have been the second-highest scoring regular season team in the NHL, averaging 3.41 goals per game. That trails only the Tampa Bay Lightning at 3.44 goals per game. There is also a SIGNIFICANT gap between the Maple Leafs and the No. 3 team on the list (the Florida Panthers). The gap between Toronto and Florida at 2 vs. 3 is the same as the gap between Florida and St. Louis, the 14th highest scoring team in the league.

In the regular season, the offense is flowing.

Over that same time period the Maple Leafs drop all the way down to 21st (out of 30 teams that have appeared in the playoffs) in goals per game at only 2.66 goals per game.

They lose almost a full goal per game from the regular season to the playoffs.

It’s a two-part problem.

On one hand, the Maple Leafs have never really been able to build out the supporting cast around their top stars. No matter how good your top players are, they are not going to dominate, or even score, in every single game, and you better have somebody else on the roster that can pick up the slack. When the Pittsburgh Penguins were winning their Stanley Cups they would go through stretches where Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin didn’t always score. But they had Phil Kessel and Carl Hagelin and Nick Bonino on a line that could make up for it.

When Tampa Bay was winning its Cups it wasn’t always about Nikita Kucherov or Steven Stamkos. Blake Coleman and Yanni Gourde were there.

When the Chicago Blackhawks were winning their Cups, it was not uncommon for Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane to go cold offensively for a few games. But there was always a secondary support offensively to make up for it.

The Maple Leafs have never had that for their stars.

On the other hand, all of the aforementioned star players (Crosby, Malkin, Kucherov, Stamkos, Kane, Toews) would still have games where they would take over and carry the team.

The Maple Leafs are also not getting that.

Their stars almost never take over and are the difference in playoff games. It’s an equally big problem.

Let’s dig into some numbers on that.