The players and coaches bear their responsibilities, but the club management is running away this time as well, writes Urheilu’s NHL editor Tommi Seppälä.
Tommi Seppälä NHL reporter
13:11•Updated 13:13
The story of the Toronto Maple Leafs is unmatched in any context. How can the world’s biggest, most valuable and supposedly most popular hockey club be so cursed and unable to succeed? Excluding the salary cap, how can you not do better with almost unlimited resources?
Hardly anyone was surprised when Boston sent Toronto on summer vacation in overtime of Game 7 of the opening round of the NHL playoffs.
Hardly any other NHL team’s core has learned over the years to be as good a loser as Toronto’s. Austin Matthews, William Nylander, Mitch Marner, John Tavares, Morgan Rielly and so on. This mercilessly expensive five has lost eight of the last nine playoff series – five times in a row.
And there was no room for explanations either: Toronto scored 12 hits in seven matches and played a dominant game with less than five percent efficiency. Soon the former head coach Sheldon Keefe stated after the game that opponents build their game against Toronto in such a way that in the end, the Leafs themselves hurt the Leafs the most.
Well said, this happened in this series as well.
A Boston agitator known for his sharp tongue From Brad Marchand was asked how Boston beat Toronto once again, he threw without even flinching: “Just be Leaf”.
In Finnish: The Maple Leafs manage to get themselves on the wrong side of the result.
A losing culture
Toronto has an incredible culture of losing. The club is like cursed, and it doesn’t seem to win even when the game gives it the chance. Maybe the deceased Harold Ballard cursed Toronto in the 1970s with his activities. The hated owner didn’t care about the results or the players. Most importantly, the cash registers at the legendary Maple Leaf Garden were singing.
Since Ballard became the principal owner of the Leafs in the 70s, the club has not won a single championship. The dry pipe is 57 years long.
Now Toronto would pay anything for the Stanley Cup, but can’t even credibly challenge to win it. No, even though we have the most player material in Leafs history for the tip. In the coming season, the five mentioned above will scrape around 54 million from the salary cap of around 88 million.
As far as scratching. After all, the team can’t survive this fiasco without a major cleanup, and they don’t like it either. After all, there’s no point in Toronto worrying about having a good time and a better tomorrow.
It is clear that head coach Keefe and his assistants cannot return to the bench next fall. The same applies to the core group of players, but how to trade any of the four top strikers, when all of them have a clause in their contracts preventing it?
John Tavares and Mitch Marner are players who will not take Toronto to a new level and at the same time they will be paid more than 20 million dollars for the upcoming season. The situation is dire.
Tavares doesn’t bring power to the Leafs’ attack, and even in the power statistics, this is nine hits in the cold during the previous six years. Marner has melted in tough places time and time again.
The jobs on the upper floor will remain
Leafs’ GM was already changed a year ago, when Kyle Dubas was allowed to leave and someone from Calgary was hired instead Brad Treliving. However, it seems that the club president is above everything that happened Brendan Shanahanwhich the so-called “Shanaplan” to save the club was released in 2014 – yes, ten years ago.
Shanahan has undoubtedly brought the Leafs to a new level, but one playoff series win in ten years leaves no room for explanation.
At the same time, huge sums of money have been handed to young stars under great pressure. Through this, it has become really difficult to find championship-level balance and depth in the team.
For this season, the club made unimaginable acquisitions Max Domin and by Ryan Reaves in the manner of. Suddenly we wanted to be tough. The club made a three-year contract for the 37-year-old Reaves, who is armless and mostly known for his fists. The two straight up lost games for the team in the Boston series.
Shanahan is responsible for all this mayhem, but the responsibility does not lie with him. Shanaplan is alive and well.
Coached Ilve this season Antti Pennanen made the famous Toronto comparison to Ilves last winter. According to Pennanen, it is no coincidence that Toronto, operating under heavy pressure, never wins the championship. Pennanen saw Toronto in Ilves. The pressure is hard, but getting behind it is necessary.
If the club management sparkled less, paid attention to the star cult a little more moderately and respected the laws of winning hockey, for example when recruiting the defense and goalkeeping departments, the odds would improve significantly.
The players have to deliver on the ice, but so should the management in the office as well. In the case of Toronto – and why not Ilves as well – there is just as much fault on both ends.
And yet the upper floor is where the jobs are and will stay.