Better luck next year: The Toronto Maple Leafs did pretty much everything wrong

The Toronto Maple Leafs have no identity, no clear strength and do not really do anything particularly well. This is a tough situation that is not going to produce an easy fix.

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.

There were a lot of reasons to be skeptical of the 2025-26 Toronto Maple Leafs.

Even though the team won 52 games during the 2024-25 season and advanced to the second-round of the playoffs for just the second time with this core group, the flaws that existed below the surface were glaring.

• Their underlying 5-on-5 numbers were near the bottom of the league, ranking 15th or worse in expected goal share, scoring chance share and high-danger scoring chance share.

• In terms of generating chances offensively, they were 19th or worse in expected goals per 60 minutes, scoring chances per 60 minutes and high-danger scoring chances per 60 minutes.

• They were largely carried by a staggeringly strong goaltending performance from Anthony Stolarz and Joseph Woll that provided the second-best 5-on-5 save percentage in the NHL and the fourth-best all-situations save percentage.

• Both players also ranked in the top-11 of goals saved above expected, with Stolarz saving 25.8 goals above expected and Woll saving 16.8 above expected. Goaltending like that masks a lot of flaws and can carry an otherwise mediocre team to a lot of wins and relatively far into the playoffs. The problem is neither goalie had any sort of consistent track record to suggest they were going to keep playing at that sort of elite level, and there was always going to be a cause for concern with some regression.

Instead of realizing those flaws, the Maple Leafs went into the offseason and did nothing to help fix them.

They finally made a change to their core group of players by making Mitch Marner the scapegoat for another playoff disappointment, sending him to the Vegas Golden Knights in a sign-and-trade deal for Nicolas Roy. Instead of using the additional salary cap space to try and replace him with another high-level star, they went with a quantity over quality approach, adding Roy, Dakota Joshua, and Mattias Maccelli. It did not help the offense, and understandably made it significantly worse.

It continued a baffling set of roster moves from general manager Brad Treliving that now has the entire franchise left in shambles following his firing earlier this week.

Go back to last year’s trade deadline and just take another look at how badly things went with just about everything they did with the roster.

The Brandon Carlo trade has turned out to be a disaster with Fraser Minten looking like a very good young NHL player, and the Maple Leafs still owing a first-round pick to Boston, either this season or in a future year. It is top-five protected this season. That pick is currently in the No. 6 slot, which would send it to Boston if it stays there.

They traded Nikita Grebenkin and another future first-round pick to the Philadelphia Flyers for Scott Laughton, and then just one year later (after mostly mis-using Laughton) could only get a conditional third-round pick back in return for him.

Just awful asset management.

While they were able to at least flip Roy for a first-round pick to help salvage some of the Marner sequence, and while they did get a couple of draft picks for pending unrestricted free agent Bobby McMann, letting Treliving run the trade deadline and make the decisions on who to trade, what to get, and who to keep only to fire him less than a month later makes it all seem like a rudderless ship with no idea how to fix itself.

None of this even gets into the issue of the head coach (Craig Berube), or the big-picture outlook that has seen them gradually drift away from their strength (offense) to try and become a bigger, tougher, more physical team without actually even doing that. They wanted to become a tougher, playoff-ready team that would not put up with anybody’s shit, and then they subjected all of us to two weeks of non-stop discourse as to why nobody did anything about their captain being lost for the season on a cheap-shot hit.

Even if you were consistently underwhelmed with the Maple Leafs playoff results over the past decade, they were at least still a highly competitive team during the regular season that played 82 mostly entertaining games.

This team was not only bad, it was boring. It was a chore to watch, rarely did anything well and no longer has any sort of identity or core strength.

Now they are left with a flawed roster, a depleted farm system, and are going to be starting over with a new general manager (and presumably a new head coach) after doing that exact same thing just a couple of years ago.

It is a mess.

Let’s take a further look into what went right and what went wrong this season, as well as what might be next.

What went right this season