Maple Leafs on the brink of elimination

The Toronto Maple Leafs are on the brink of being eliminated from the playoffs. Despite winning one more game and making it further than ever before, having their most complete team of the Auston Matthews era, and having home ice advantage, the Leafs have all but repeated the script.

The narrative has become unavoidable with half the Core Four coming up for new contracts. Live trackers of their individual outputs during Games 5-7 of their first-round series paint their own picture. Fans booing the team during and after a 6–1 drubbing in Game 5 paints another.

The gravity of the moment holds the balance of the team’s future. In the heat of the moment, the Leafs have wilted, which is hardly confidence-inspiring for the concept of the team itself. The Florida Panthers might well be the better team on paper, if only slightly. That does not excuse the Leafs, however, from giving anyone reasons to believe. Up two games to none in the series, the Leafs were flirting with the chance to reclaim judgment. 

Fans disassociating with the team

Alas, the mirage was not to last. Once more, belief in this team requires a lot of imagination. The seedlings of hope have grown warped into questions of despair. Increasing apathy takes hold, each disappointment stinging less as the Leafs’ limitations seem inevitable. 

Suddenly, these questions begin to take shape. Some might linger on the past. What if Mitch Marner waived his no-movement clause to be traded to the Carolina Hurricanes for Mikko Rantanen? Others might stay in the moment and question if Matthews is injured. Some are already looking to the future and wondering if changing only one member of the Core Four is enough.

Some fans might be driven to the extreme, hoping for a full rebuild. An aging team with a lot of great pieces, but without their next three years’ worth of first-round picks, this is extremely unrealistic. There might be an effort to get younger, or to disperse the salary structure of the team.

What does the future look like?

The lacklustre loss the Leafs are speeding towards might spell the end of Brendan Shanahan and Mitch Marner’s tenure as Leafs on principle alone. A new vision for the team might alter the moves General Manager Brad Treliving is able to make. That said, the cap space from Marner leaving would offer the space to remake the roster. The Leafs will almost certainly use this cap space to acquire a centre, though it is difficult to think that a player of Ryan O’Reilly’s calibre will be available. 

Unfortunately, they have already shipped out internal options such as Fraser Minten. The Leafs continue to do well in adding interesting prospects for low costs outside the draft, but the chance of developing internal options has diminished. The Leafs might be forced into more creative or risky opportunities. The blue line is not getting younger either, and is less and less likely to maintain its standard of play in the years ahead. Perhaps the Leafs need to try to acquire a younger player with Norris Trophy potential. Daunting, even with a richness of resources.

While fans might be carried away listening to the call from fate, the team will have to find a way to dig deeper. The Leafs still have a chance to fight back, though the chance to make a meaningful statement is on its last leg. If the Leafs are not able to fight back, there will be time for questions of change for the fans who have not checked out altogether. 

Last gasp for the Core Four

Perhaps we can separate John Tavares from the Core Four disappointment, especially if he returns at a discount. Maybe we can absolve William Nylander from the worst of it, thanks to his production being substantially better in these late series situations and his being the Leafs’ most dangerous player in Game 5 by a wide margin. Perhaps Matthews is significantly injured, enough that we can forgive some of his struggles. Marner undoubtedly becomes the focus, but many fans might have no love left for the quartet as a whole. 

Outside of winning the series, losing with dignity might already be out of the question. Regardless of injuries, illness, and even the absence of starting goalie Anthony Stolarz for most of the series, the Leafs have been uninspiring enough on this three-game slide to undo a lot of goodwill. 

Echoes of quotes from offseasons past have yet to fade before the premonitions of locker clean-out quotes have come into focus. The team is perpetually on the periphery, picking away and adjusting around the core. Moving off of these star players—once thought painful, if not impossible—has been well earned many times over.

With at least one more game in the series, how the Leafs choose to go down will be telling. A loss will paint every decision as desperate, whether the lines change or not. The other side of the wager is that the team still has one last chance to change the narrative. 

Taking notes from more successful organizations

There is a growing chance that the final four teams will be exactly the same as last season. This might give solace to those seeking rationalization; the upper echelons of the league are a difficult group to join. The Panthers have been bold to become what they are now, trading for Matthew Tkachuk after winning the Presidents’ Trophy. The Dallas Stars have been equally ambitious, adding Mikko Rantanen, though the team did manage to keep expensive veterans Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin through some leaner seasons. 

The Carolina Hurricanes made their own Rantanen deal, but routinely have one of the strongest prospect pools in the league. The Edmonton Oilers, meanwhile, have two superstars that consistently produce in the playoffs: Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. The strength of the team around them has improved over the years, but even in more flimsy iterations of the team, the stars were doing more than their part. In a copycat league, the Leafs might have to be bold to keep pace off the ice if they prove once more that they cannot keep pace on the ice.