As team cools, Tavares feels heat
For starters, remember this is the same Maple Leafs team that beat powerful Winnipeg twice last week.
Yes, that was just last week. One dominant road win over the best team in Canada, and one stirring, come-from-behind victory.
Secondly, are you really that surprised that without their best player, and arguably their two most gifted goal scorers, the Leafs struggled to put the puck in the net the last three games? And are you really that surprised Kasperi Kapanen isn’t going to score 50 after all?
You shouldn’t be. Look, this league is packed very tightly. There are no truly great NHL teams any more, players get hot and cool off and, as usual, scoring is declining as we get into the meat of the season and most games are going to be one-goal decisions.
So, losses to Calgary and Dallas, two Western Conference teams hungry to get back into the playoffs, can rightly be viewed as disappointments by Toronto fans, two home games that should have produced at least two points. But the shots were 32-19 in favour of the Leafs against Dallas, and 16-4 in the third. That’s not the sign of a team in serious trouble, despite what you might read on your preferred form of social media.
But this is Toronto. There there will be irrational fan reactions — blame it all on Ron Hainsey! — and there will be unreasonable ones that seemingly assume the other team isn’t also trying to win. Like, shouldn’t the Leafs really be 13-0 right now? Or at worst 12-0-1?
It’s too early for report cards, too early to note any particular trends. What we can identify, however, is the three individuals in the Leaf organization who are most likely to receive the greatest amount of scrutiny as the season continues to unfold this month.
JOHN TAVARES
Well, young man, you didn’t expect to get $77 million U.S. with no strings attached, did you?
It no longer matters whether Tavares came to Toronto for less money than he might have been able to get somewhere else. Performance is all that matters now.
This will be Tavares’s first experience with the intense scrutiny that can come with being a Leaf, particularly a highly paid one. The guess here is that it won’t shake him even a little bit. If you can survive being part of a substandard NHL operation on Long Island the way Tavares did for so long, you’ve probably built up a pretty tough hide.
Still, you never know how an athlete will respond to the spotlight in the big town until he’s actually under it. Moreover, with Auston Matthews out for, we expect, all of November, it’s logical to look to Tavares to produce more and make up the difference.
He started with 10 points, including six goals, in his first five games. No chance he was going to keep up that blistering pace. In his last five games, he has one goal and two assists, and against the Stars he just missed on a couple of spectacular chances. We know he saw coming to Toronto as the chance of a lifetime. Well, now he’s up to his hips in all that being a Leaf includes.
MIKE BABCOCK
For the most part, since he arrived in Toronto, Babcock has attracted no criticism. Zero. Folks in the 416/647/905 were just so darn surprised he was actually willing to come and coach the worst team in hockey (for a ton of dough) it was hard to imagine ever criticizing the guy.
But this is the fourth year of his historic eight-year contract signed in 2015. He’s not the fresh face he was, basking in the glow of Olympic gold. The team has overachieved in the past two years and now people want it to overachieve some more, which means at least getting past the first round.
The sense of gratefulness that came with Babcock’s choice of the Leafs has evaporated, and you’re starting to hear grumbling. Most of it is nonsensical — time to bring Sheldon Keefe in, for example — but grumbling is grumbling. It can be contagious.
Fact is, Babcock’s the best coach this franchise has had since Paul Maurice. He’s on the cutting edge of the game, and he’s done wonders with this team. Still, a coach in Toronto is always a target. Always.
KYLE DUBAS
At this rate, Dubas is going to have a hard time winning GM of the year.
He inherited most of this team. He didn’t build it. But you could certainly argue his predecessor, Lou Lamoriello, has had more of a positive impact on the Islanders this season than Dubas has had on the Leafs.
Signing Tavares was a franchise triumph, not a single executive’s achievement. Otherwise, Dubas didn’t replace James van Riemsdyk’s scoring on the left side in any meaningful way. Tyler Ennis has been mostly ineffective. Defenceman Igor Ozhiganov is struggling to stay in the lineup and probably needed to start with the Marlies. Par Lindholm has pretty much been a neutral factor, neither negative nor positive. Andreas Johnsson has been a significant disappointment. Those are all Dubas moves and decisions.
Most important, Dubas hasn’t been able to get William Nylander’s name on a contract, and Nylander’s presence would surely help this team right now with secondary scoring. People can talk about the salary-cap complications all day and all night, but it’s the job of the GM to get players under contract without missing games, and Nylander has now missed a month.
The freshman GM’s proclamation of “We can, and we will” when it comes to signing all of Toronto’s young players seem to be turning into “We may not be able to, and we aren’t.”
Would Lamoriello have done better? Hard to say. But other than signing Tavares, which was big, Dubas’s impact so far has been negligible. People are starting to notice.