It is never a great thing in the NHL when you’re playing must-win games in January. Yet that’s where the Toronto Maple Leafs are right now, after losing four home games in a row and going 1-4-2 in their last seven outings.
This has had the makings of a lost season for months now, after Toronto posted 15 wins in the first 35 games to hit fake .500 (15-15-5) despite one of the easier, home-heavy schedules in the league. All of those early losses created a massive hurdle that the Leafs almost erased in going 9-1-3 coming out of the Christmas break, a stretch that put them back in the playoff race.
What they couldn’t afford was this face plant over the past two weeks, not with most of their division stringing together endless point streaks and the playoff bar rising as the season has worn on.
Where they stand now is grim. Entering Tuesday’s almost must-win game against the red-hot Buffalo Sabres, the Leafs are the 20th-best team in the NHL and on pace for 90 points with only a 25.9 percent chance of making the postseason. With 30 games remaining, they need to go 19-10-1 to get to 96 points, which is the current cutoff for the second wild-card spot thanks to what’s happening in the Atlantic Division.
After hosting Buffalo on Tuesday, 19 of the Leafs’ remaining 29 games (66 percent) are on the road, including games against some daunting opponents like the Edmonton Oilers, Tampa Bay Lightning, Florida Panthers and Minnesota Wild.
This wouldn’t be an easy finish to the schedule for anyone. For an aging, beat-up Leafs team that looks both out of sorts and out of gas, it feels almost insurmountable.
Which brings us to the trade deadline.
The ongoing debate across the league at the moment is which teams are going to be buyers and sellers. With the mushy middle so packed this season, that line may not get settled until right up until March 6 for many teams — a group the Leafs likely felt they would be a part of. They’ve lost so many games in this short span, however, that their playoff chances have tanked in the past two weeks, essentially halving their odds.
A regulation loss against the Sabres would put Buffalo eight points up and likely out of reach; they’d join the Lightning (+13 points up on Toronto), Detroit Red Wings (+12), Boston Bruins and Montreal Canadiens (both +6) as clubs with a sizeable lead given the number of three-point games being played.
With the way the NHL’s weird playoff format works, only five teams from one division can make it in, meaning the Leafs would have to not only fend off the two-time defending champion Panthers (+2 points up on them) but also leapfrog one of the other five teams with a comfortable lead to claim the second wild-card spot.
It’s possible, especially with games remaining against all of those clubs save for Detroit. But it’s not particularly plausible — especially not with how badly Toronto has struggled defensively for most of the campaign.
Frankly, it feels too late for the Leafs to think about making a move to bolster this lineup. Reinforcements were needed a month or two ago, when they were giving waiver pickup Troy Stecher 24-plus minutes a night, playing 34-year-old Oliver Ekman-Larsson on the top pair on his off side, riding what’s left of Jake McCabe into a stub with a zillion D-zone starts and still trying Morgan Rielly in No. 1 D-man minutes.
On paper, Toronto’s blue line looked old and slow coming into the season, especially after its inability to move the puck cooked it in the playoffs against Florida last year. Mix in three significant injuries to Chris Tanev that have limited him to parts of 11 games and some lengthy absences to others, and the defence corps just hasn’t been good enough to compete with the league’s better teams.
The Leafs front office has felt a bit paralyzed all year, seeming shell-shocked by how inept this team has looked after last season’s 108-point season. Other than making three waiver claims — Stecher, Cayden Primeau and Sammy Blais — all they’ve done is kick tires on unrealistic options for outside help without pulling the trigger on a deal.
None of their struggling players, like Philippe Myers and Simon Benoit, have been shipped out, even to the Marlies. No trades have been particularly close, either, even as the Feb. 4 Olympic roster freeze has upped the urgency for some of the teams around them. They’ve sat on their hands, hoping for a turnaround. It certainly appears that inaction has cost them.
Maybe the Leafs reel off five wins here before the break for the Games and that changes the conversation. Maybe the fact that they only have three Olympians (Auston Matthews, William Nylander and Ekman-Larsson) and their other battered bodies will get 21 days’ rest changes the equation when they come back.
But it’s getting late really early for Toronto, to the point that another two or three losses in the next week should be enough to put up a “for sale” sign.
I honestly don’t know if general manager Brad Treliving will go that route while his team still has a shot at the playoffs. It’s fairly clear that his job is in jeopardy here, even with another year remaining on his contract. Ownership of the Leafs is about to be fully consolidated under the Rogers umbrella, and after the success of the Blue Jays last fall, the bar has been set sky-high for all the Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment’s franchises by new president Keith Pelley.
It’s fair to say the Leafs are currently limboing well under said bar right now.
But given how thin Toronto’s playoff chances are, how hard the road is ahead and how poorly it has been playing, it would be malpractice if the front office isn’t at least thinking about its options to sell. The Leafs have to at least plan for that eventuality, even as they hope for a miracle.
In addition to pending UFAs Scott Laughton, Bobby McMann, Stecher and Calle Järnkrok, Treliving could be a power player at the deadline if he was willing to dangle higher-value assets such as Ekman-Larsson and subtract a few underperformers (choosing among Benoit, Matias Maccelli, Brandon Carlo, Dakota Joshua, Anthony Stolarz and Max Domi) to reset the deck for next season.
It’s possible Toronto could bring in a handful of picks and/or prospects while opening acres of cap space for 2026-27, giving management a ton of flexibility for a significant retool in the offseason.
They’d get younger. Get hungrier. Just get different. And begin to actually change their DNA.
It doesn’t make sense to move the biggest names now, not with all the no-movement clauses and other complications involved. You’re not looking to lose a bunch of trades here for the sake of doing something. But that middle-tier group of players could offer some real opportunities, especially if only a few other NHL teams look to cash out and it becomes a sellers’ market.
The biggest issue with going the sell-big route, however, is that it would be hard to have confidence in the current front office to execute it well, given all the pro scouting misses it has had over the past year. And, again, it’s also hard to imagine Treliving will be eager to embrace it all, given how tenuous his job appears.
A lot of this comes back to errors the Leafs have made in the past. They should have, for example, been more proactive in trying to replace Brendan Shanahan as president when he was let go last May, bringing in an experienced failsafe option if the season went sideways.
Despite boasting an army of AGMs, the Leafs don’t have anyone in the front office who makes sense to step in and make decisions if Treliving isn’t ownership’s guy. And getting this next stage of the retool right is going to be critical if they want to have a bounce-back next season.
If they keep sitting on their hands, however, they may miss the playoffs, give up a top-10 pick to a division rival, lose their pending UFAs for nothing, hang onto their dead-weight contracts, recoup zero futures, get another year older and leave a giant mess for the next GM to clean up in a very short window in the offseason.
Which could just land them back here again a year from now, asking the same sad questions about whether this group has anything left to give.
