ATLANTIC DIVISION RACE ONLY GETTING MORE FIERCE
Leafs will have to battle stormy seas in bid to just retain a spot in playoffs
What does a successful season look like for the Toronto Maple Leafs?
How about an unsuccessful one?
Two days into training camp, the latter is once again starting to pick up some steam. After all, the Leafs have major question marks in net. Two of their top six defencemen are already out with injuries, while another is in a contract holdout. And based on the betting odds, both their general manager and head coach appear to be on borrowed time.
Forget about failing in the first round. Is there a chance that Toronto, which has qualified for the post-season for six straight years, might miss out on the playoffs entirely?
That might sound unrealistic — if not unfathomable — after the year the Leafs had last season, having finished with the fourth-best record in the NHL, with Auston Matthews leading the league in goals and Mitch Marner ranking 10th overall in points. Then again, a lot has changed since then. Not so much with Toronto, but rather with the teams around them.
With non-playoff teams, such as Ottawa, Detroit and possibly Buffalo, all expected to make a major push for a playoff spot, the already tough Atlantic Division just got a whole lot tougher. Toronto, along with Florida, Tampa Bay and Boston, is still considered one of the favourites to grab one of the top three seeds. But a lot still has to go right for the Leafs to get into the playoffs. Or rather, a lot can't go wrong.
And this year, there's a lot that can go wrong.
No one is sure what a Matt Murray-ilya Samsonov goalie tandem is going to look like. Or whether a back end that is already depleted by Rasmus Sandin's contract dispute, injuries to Jake Muzzin and Timothy Liljegren and susceptible to old age — Jordie Benn is 35, while Mark Giordano will be 39 when the season starts — will hold up. Or how a team that knows it will be judged solely by its performance in the playoffs will deal with the mental fatigue of a somewhat meaningless regular season.
Add it up and the Leafs can't afford to sleepwalk through the first 82 games — something that Matthews acknowledged.
“( You can say) it doesn't matter what you do in the regular season. But it does,” the reigning MVP told Postmedia at the player media tour in Las Vegas last week. “Like, you got to put yourself in a good position come playoff time. You've got to make it to the playoffs, too. And we've got a pretty competitive division. Teams are getting better as well.”
Indeed, each of the top four teams in the Atlantic Division won 50 or more games and finished with 100-plus points last season. And whether it's Ottawa, Detroit or Buffalo, those objects in the rear-view mirror are closer than they appeared a year ago.
“I know people mentioned a lot this summer that it's the toughest division,” said Senators captain Brady Tkachuk, “and that's just kind of what we want as an organization. We want that challenge. We want to prove all the doubters wrong.”
Toughest division in hockey sounds like an excuse you save for when the Leafs once again get knocked out of first round or — gasp! — fail to even make the playoffs. But it's real. And it's not going away any time soon.
If anything, the division is only going to get tougher from here on in.
For the Leafs, it is not that they missed out on their chance of winning a Cup or that their championship window is closing. It is that along with Toronto, there's now about four or five other teams also trying to poke their head through.
One of those teams is Tampa Bay, which has made three straight trips to the final and is coming back with a similar roster as to the one that knocked out the Leafs in the first round last year. Another is Florida, which won the most games in the NHL last season and just added Matthew Tkachuk's snarl specifically to get over the playoff hump.
Boston, which begins the year without Brad Marchand and Charlie Mcavoy, is starting to age out. But don't forget that the Bruins, who finished with 107 points last year, still have a topfive goalie in Jeremy Swayman, acquired defenceman Hampus Lindholm at the trade deadline, and brought back Patrice Bergeron and David Pastrnak specifically for what they hope will be one last championship run.
And then there's the non-playoff teams.
Ottawa GM Pierre Dorion may have won the summer by adding Claude Giroux, Alex Debrincat and Cam Talbot to a rebuild that is ready to take off. As well, Detroit GM Steve Yzerman added David Perron, Andrew Copp and plenty more to another young and emerging group that is led by Calder Trophy winner Moritz Seider.
Buffalo is probably still a year away. Montreal, maybe two years away. But with both adding No. 1 picks to their roster, neither is expected to be pushovers.
“Every team is great in that division,” said Florida's Tkachuk, who is coming over from the Pacific Division.
“It's definitely a super-competitive division,” said Swayman.
“The Atlantic is probably the best division right now,” said Philadelphia's Cam Atkinson. “Other than Colorado winning the Cup last year, with Tampa and Florida — and I'm excited for that rivalry, see how that goes down — and every team, there's no easy games.”
There are no easy outs. And for the Leafs, there are no guarantees.