RATTLING THE SABRES
Toronto GM happy with what he has assembled, now it’s up to coach Babcock
After slow start, Leafs roar to life in 5-3 win over Buffalo, while Dubas opts to stay the course at trade deadline.
As an antsy fan base wrung its hands on an NHL trade-deadline day that saw Maple Leafs rookie general manager Kyle Dubas decline to address organizational needs at right defence and Wayne Simmonds-style grittiness, let’s consider the situations in rival markets.
Things could definitely be better. Consider Tampa Bay, where the leaguebest Lightning didn’t see the need to bother with even the slightest of dead- line tweaks.
“We have, I think, answers for what our opponents will throw at us,” rookie GM Julien Brisebois told reporters. And given the Lightning’s light-years advantage in the league standings, who’s arguing?
Things could also definitely be a lot worse. Consider Ottawa, where in the lead-up to Monday’s 3 p.m. deadline the worst team in the league traded its three top-scoring forwards, only to have its owner tell the CBC the firesale-conducting Senators are “hoping to bring a Stanley Cup very soon.” This is the same owner, Eugene Melnyk, whose attempts at securing a longsought downtown arena have so far failed; who last season dangled the possibility of moving the team if fans don’t show up to the franchise’s outmoded rural barn; and who recently insisted he’d spend “close” to the full extent of the NHL salary cap beginning in 2021, a vow roughly as ironclad as the one on the dusty barroom sign that promises “Free Beer Tomorrow.”
While even half-working bull-bleep detectors go haywire when Melnyk speaks, you could take it on well-established faith, based on the track record of Toronto’s Shana-plan, that Leafs GM Kyle Dubas was offering something approximating a sincere assessment when he professed faith in his team as assembled.
“This is our group,” Dubas said before Monday’s 5-3 win over the Sabres. “We have every belief this group can have a lot of success together.”
That belief meant Dubas’s only move on Monday saw fourth-line winger Par Lindholm sent to Winnipeg in exchange for Jets fringe forward Nic Petan. Lindholm, in his first NHL season after being plucked from Sweden as a free agent, has mostly been a 27-yearold nonfactor.
Petan, bereft of opportunity in Winnipeg, is a 23-year-old who at least has a chance to be more than that, if he can find his way into Toronto’s lineup. At the very least, Petan provides internal competition for the fourth-line centre spot. Don’t think it’s a complete coincidence that incumbent Frederik Gauthier, who hadn’t scored since Dec. 28, potted a goal Monday night.
And don’t think Dubas’s belief is misplaced. Sure, Simmonds, to some eyes, would have brought compelling toughness, not to mention a heartwarming Scarborough homecoming story. And considering the Flyers forward was traded to Nashville for a conditional fourth-round pick and bottomsix forward Ryan Hartman, he wouldn’t have been expensive. But forward isn’t Toronto’s problem position. Dubas, to his credit, is sticking to his theory that his team, if it’s nobody’s idea of tough, is steely in its own way. And as for the long- sought help on right defence, the short supply of the commodity clearly made it too rich for the GM’s blood, which is fair enough.
So let’s forget all that, for this season, at least, and acknowledge that this is an awfully good team, one of an elite handful in the league. How many NHL team-runners can say they’ve got a Vezina Trophy candidate in goal (in Frederik Andersen), a Norris Trophy candidate on defence (in Morgan Rielly), and an embarrassment of riches down the middle (in centremen Auston Matthews, John Tavares and Nazem Kadri, the latter of whom missed his third straight game with a concussion Monday)? That’s a rare collection of elite talent, to be sure.
And it has produced results, albeit of the anecdotal, regularseason kind. No team but Tampa Bay has scored at a higher rate in five-on-five situations. And no team has rivalled the Leafs when it comes to scoring depth. Head- ing into Monday’s slate of games, Toronto boasted a league-high nine players with at least 13 goals. The next best team had seven. Rivals like Boston and Washington had five each. Sure, Boston spent Monday acquiring Marcus Johannsson, the 28-year-old winger well remembered in Toronto for scoring the overtime goal for Washington that eliminated the Leafs from the playoffs in 2017. But that addition, as well as that of thirdline forward Charlie Coyle, left more than a few Boston observers unimpressed. Depth is best built through the draft, as it has been in Toronto. Building it while tossing away draft picks is nobody’s road to intelligent team building.
Indeed, if you take a 30,000foot view of the lead-up to the trade deadline, Dubas’s biggest move came July 1, when he won the John Tavares sweepstakes and repatriated the former New York Islanders star. His second-biggest move came Dec. 1, when he struck an 11th-hour deal to ensure Wil- liam Nylander wouldn’t be in the KHL as Toronto takes what might turn out to be its best shot at a Stanley Cup in this promising era. Dubas’s nextbiggest move came Jan. 28, when L.A. Kings defenceman Jake Muzzin was brought to Toronto in exchange for a first-round pick and prospects Carl Grunstrom and Sean Durzi.
Muzzin’s L.A. resumé suggested he was a puck-possession machine with a Stanley Cup ring and a physical edge. And all those checkmarks made the deal seem like a no-brainer to most observers. A notable exception, mind you, was head coach Mike Babcock, who, from the get-go, was clearly less impressed.
“There’s no question about it: It’s not perfect,” Babcock said of the Muzzin acquisition. “It’s what we got. It’s what was available. And we’re going to make it work.”
So far, it hasn’t worked — at least, it hasn’t worked in the way many expected. Dubas, after all, heralded Muzzin as a stud with the “ability to play at the top end of our defence, play in all situations, play against the other team’s top players.” Babcock, heading into Monday’s game against the Sabres, had so far given Muzzin the fifth-most minutes among Toronto’s defencemen, both at even strength and in total time on ice. So while Dubas clearly saw Muzzin as a player who would supplant Ron Hainsey in the team’s top four, Babcock, judging it over a month, hasn’t seen him the same way.
Things could be better, and things could be worse. And with most of six weeks left until the playoffs begin, things can still change. But if they don’t, you get the sense Dubas won’t mind blaming Babcock if the coach doesn’t get this group to do what it’s supposed to do — which is, at the very least, win the franchise its first playoff series in 15 years. This is Dubas’s group, the one the Shana-plan produced. Now it’s on the coach to find the answers for whatever opponents throw at it.