Leaf watchers left to wonder: Are they really trying?
The signs of ignominy are all over the place for the Toronto Maple Leafs. There was the non-sellout in Monday’s loss to the Minnesota Wild, the smallest Leafs crowd at the Air Canada Centre in the history of the building. There was the television demotion last Saturday, where their game was bumped from the CBC into the relatively low-rent district of Sportsnet. Even Don Cherry has turned on them, saying on that same broadcast that it was “sad to watch” a team that seemed to just “roll over and die.”
Then there is the record, which should be kept out of the view of small children lest it frighten them: six wins and 30 losses since Jan. 1. The final bit of humiliation could come this Saturday, when the tepid cheers of Leafs fans will face an invading horde of Ottawa Senators supporters, just like what used to happen routinely to the home side when Toronto played in Ottawa over the years.
It has come to this, then, for Maple Leafs fans: Even Ottawa is about to rub their noses in it.
The Sens provide a useful contrast to a Leafs season that is presently defying the use of mere words. To call them a smouldering tire fire is to do a disservice to the notion of burnt rubber. Since Randy Carlyle was fired in early January, Toronto has gone 6-25-3 and Ottawa has ripped off a 21-9-4 record. The Senators were five wins back of the Leafs on Jan. 6; now they are 10 wins in front. In two-plus months.
The Carlyle firing, obviously, has had no direct bearing on Ottawa’s success, unless the Senators secretly found it wildly inspiring. But it’s useful for noting their hot streak since then is, presumably, the kind of thing that Toronto’s front office was trying to achieve when it dumped their coach.
Instead, Toronto went from inside a playoff position to comically outside of one, along the way engaging in fights with the media, trading key players, having their best centre suspended (twice), and generally devolving to the point where the key nightly question isn’t whether they win or lose, but — and this is not a great look for a professional team — whether they appear to be trying.
That last part — has this team quit on the season? — has been raised not just by Cherry, but by so many media types in recent days, not to mention the interim head coach and his underwhelming starting goaltender, that it is starting to become baked in. There’s just no way to know if it happens to be true. Like the mystical quest for shot quality, one can’t answer whether a team has effectively lost interest in playing without being in their heads, not that it will stop any number of observers from taking a stab at it.
What we do know is that since the mid-February trade of Cody Franson and Mike Santorelli to Nashville, the point at which management metaphorically told its players that the present season was no longer a concern, Toronto has won four of 17 games. Their roster, now populated by so many American League call-ups that it looks only like the hazy outline of an NHL lineup, has been outscored by a cumulative 63-32 over that period.
Have the players quit, or are they just not very good?
The case for the former is bolstered by the play of the top line, which has gone cold like Hoth.
Phil Kessel, over the last halfseason, is on a pace that would put him at fewer than 15 goals in a full year. His linemates, Tyler Bozak and James van Riemsdyk, have suffered similarly precipitous drops in production in the second half of their seasons. Kessel last week bristled at the suggestion, offered by coach Peter Horachek, that the players weren’t putting forth enough effort, saying that everyone was still trying.
And while the numbers sure look like the top line isn’t engaged — all three are among the worst players in the league in terms of plus-minus rating — the problem with that view is that none of them have ever played a style that sees them racing all over the ice, even when their production has been strong.
Put another way, I’m not sure a fully-engaged Kessel looks very different than a Kessel who is half-assing it. It’s just that normally he scores enough in bursts to make everyone overlook the dry spells. (Over the three seasons prior to this one, he was in the top three in NHL scoring.)
Horachek, meanwhile, keeps running the top line out there, with each forward getting more than 21 minutes of ice time against the Wild, although he eventually tried some other bodies on the power play. If Horachek truly thinks Kessel and friends have given up, wouldn’t he, you know, bench them? Even for just a wee bit? And, sure, it’s possible that there’s a larger organizational reason for the ice-time distribution — losses are good at this point, after all — it would be an odd strategy to take when management just finished suspending centre Nazem Kadri for three games because they did not care for his attitude.
In the end, the verdict on who has quit and who has not most likely comes in the off-season. It will be delivered by Brendan Shanahan, the guy in the president’s office.