If the Toronto Maple Leafs front office was still waiting for a sign as to how to proceed at the trade deadline, their players have certainly answered them. And their fans have, too, with how they booed them off the ice in their first game back at home in more than a month.
Three consecutive losses out of the Olympic break, all embarrassingly lopsided, including a 5-2 blowout against the Ottawa Senators on Saturday night, where they were outshot 16-2 to open the game.
With just two regulation wins in their last 15 games, the Leafs look like a team that has given up. Most of their fans were a ways ahead of them, having thrown in the towel on this mess a while ago.
It was instructive just how bleak the responses from Leafs fans were when we put out the call for reader questions during the break. The majority simply wanted to know when one of the architects of this mess (coach, general manager or president) would be fired and who could be brought in to fix this in the offseason.
Amid that bleakness, however, one query stood out to me as representative of where the franchise is at.
“Is it possible to do a reload or retool rather than a full rebuild?” they asked. “Is it realistic to think the Leafs can acquire a top-pair defenseman and a second-line centre this summer?”
“Are the Leafs even fixable?” is a question from a dark timeline, far darker than the tank years a decade ago that resulted in a lottery pick and drafting captain Auston Matthews first overall. At least then there was hope and some semblance of a plan. There was a purpose to being that bad — getting those high picks and young players and starting something new — and some agency from those in charge.
The Leafs currently have none of that. They have a head coach who hasn’t had answers for months, a GM who hasn’t made a trade since July 17, and a new president who chalked this miserable season up to injuries and a tough schedule in a recent missive to season ticket holders.
Behind the scenes, there seem to be mixed messages about what the plan even is, including how forcefully they should sell despite the fact that one of the oldest teams in the league, with four pending unrestricted free agents on the roster, is sitting in 24th place.
The real story of this season is one of abject failure from everyone to act. Failure to spend the $13 million they had earmarked for a Mitch Marner extension on anything of value in the summer. Failure to pivot, by firing the coach or shaking up the roster, when an ugly start threatened their season right out of the gate. Failure to plan a course at this trade deadline that is aggressive and creative rather than a paint-by-numbers, sell-a-couple-rentals approach.
If there’s a silver lining to what’s happening right now on the ice, it’s that the Leafs are playing so badly out of the Olympic break that the Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment brass can’t possibly handwave the incompetence away.
This season isn’t the result of bad bounces and poor fortune. The Leafs’ record is what it is due to a long list of bungled decisions, going back to a rushed approach to replacing the last GM 2 1/2 years ago, a lame-duck president’s desperate moves at last year’s deadline, and a star player who predictably walked away from all that dysfunction, leaving a gaping hole behind.
Is it possible for this Leafs team to do a reload or retool rather than simply tearing it down and rebuilding anew, the way they did back in 2015? It’s certainly going to be incredibly difficult, given this is one of the oldest teams in the NHL, one likely without its first-round pick in the next two drafts, nor any high-impact prospects coming. The laundry list of what this organization needs to get back to respectability is enormous, and that’s if we’re just talking about the on-ice product.
Toronto goaltender Joseph Woll was benched in the second period after allowing five goals on 28 shots. (Photo by Chris Tanouye / Getty Images)
What will make turning this around impossible, however, is if ownership doesn’t even understand the problem or how they got here. What this franchise needs now more than anything is engaged, savvy leadership. They need a housecleaning of anyone whose poor decisions (and indecision) led them to this point. They need to go out and do what they should have done when Kyle Dubas (in 2023) and Brendan Shanahan (last year) were fired and hire one of the best executive teams in the league. Then step back and get out of the way.
It’s possible that you do that and the smart folks you put in charge view this as unsalvageable in the near term. But if you look around the NHL this season, you’ll see teams all over the place that have surprised and shot up the standings, including the Buffalo Sabres, Detroit Red Wings, Pittsburgh Penguins, New York Islanders and Boston Bruins in Toronto’s own conference. How they got there is a credit to their coaches and their management teams, who made the best of difficult situations and strategically improved year over year more than their competition.
The Leafs still have some quality pieces here. They have decent goaltenders, a captain who recently won the Hart Trophy, and a few veterans on reasonable contracts who were key contributors to last season’s 108-point campaign. They remain the richest team in hockey, able to load up on off-ice talent behind the bench and in the management suite. They still play in the biggest market in the league, a city that can be a draw for free agents wanting to come play at home.
But if they’re going to attempt to turn this around in time for next season — in time to convince their best players to stay and other stars to join the fight — it has to start immediately. And it has to involve using MLSE’s financial heft to rebuild the front office into something formidable.
If they’re not willing to do that or capable of doing that, then, no, it is not going to be possible for the Leafs to reload or retool this summer. They will not get better on the ice. Matthews and the other players with value will not want to stay. And they’ll sink back into the abyss of mediocrity that the organization lived in for a decade at the start of the salary cap era. If that’s the plan, then they might as well save some time and heartache and tear down the roster entirely to begin chasing the lottery balls anew.
It would make a lot more sense than what’s gone on during this season’s downward spiral.
