Underdog narrative doesn’t fit this team
As Kyle Dubas was pointing out the other day, there’s no shortage of anxiety aand panic in Leafland lately. And you can understand why. The playoffs are less than two months away, yet the Maple Leafs will wake up Monday morning residing outside the postseason picture as measured by points percentage.
Their No. 1 defenceman is still recovering from a broken foot and the club has raised the possibility he could be out for the remainder of the regular season. Their No. 1 goaltender is still recovering from a neck injury that kept him out of a weekend back-to-back, and he hadn’t been playing particularly great when healthy. The rest of the lineup spent Saturday’s disappointing third period in Montreal producing precisely one shot on goal en route to a 2-1 overtime loss.
Coach Sheldon Keefe called those dismal 20 minutes of turnover-rife carelessness a display of “all the things we don’t want to be as a team,” at least on the offensive end.
And the bulk of the remaining games on the schedule don’t look easy. Of the Leafs’ final 26 games, 14 are against teams that came into Sunday ahead of them in the standings. What’s Toronto’s record against such teams? An underwhelming 8-11-3. In other words, the top 12 teams in the league. They’re going to need to be better.
But there’s a way to spin this predicament positively. Heck, the Leafs just spent a weekend winning three of a possible four points in a back-to-back situation using a goaltender not named Frederik Andersen; so Jack Campbell’s presence alone could be a game chang-er.
And so, too, could the current circum- stance. Last season, the Leafs coasted into the playoffs, their spot in the postseason pecking order seemingly predetermined for months. Maybe what’s required here — nothing less than a sprint to the finish line — will be the missing ingredient to playoff success. Or at least the Leafs have been heard telling themselves such things.
“I think adversity, when you get it through the season, it gives you a better chance,” Travis Dermott, the Toronto defenceman, was saying the other day. “You see the teams that don’t go through anything—those are the teams that take the first-round exits, the teams that don’ t end up making it through. It’ s the teams that go through the ups and down sand have these hard times that end up coming together at the right time.”
In other words: This is a test. This is only a test. It’ll only be an actual emergency if the Leafs fail to rise to it. And fair enough. There has never been a reason to believe this team won’t make the Stanley Cup tournament. It’ s too talented and too resource-advantaged not to be there.
“(This) is a great test and opportunity for our guys to grow,” Leafs general
manager Kyle Dubas said last week. “I’m excited about it. I don’t fear it.”
That’s great to know. Because fearlessness is going to be required as the Leafs approach the Feb. 24 trade deadline with a gaping need on the blue line.
Still, when Dubas spoke to the media following last week’s trade for Campbell and Kyle Clifford, it was easy enough to get the sense he was laying the groundwork for a post-failure rationalization.
For one thing, Dubas boasted about how his team was fifth in the league in points percentage since Keefe took over from Mike Babcock in late November. That stat held true Sunday. But how, exactly, is that relevant? The 23 games under Babcock also count, last time we checked. And since we’re talking about the strength of the remaining schedule, it’s worth noting the relative ease of Keefe’s introduction to Toronto.
Of his 33 games as Leafs coach, only nine had come against teams in the top 12 heading into Sunday. (The Leafs, who sat 13th overall, are 5-4 in those nine games — a 91-point pace.) It was as though Dubas was suggesting the season didn’t actually begin until Babcock had left the building. But it will only reflect dismally on Dubas, who clearly should have fired Babcock in the off-season, if the Leafs narrowly miss a playoff berth on account of wasting 23 games under a doomed tactician.
For another thing, Dubas spent a few memorable moments last week feebly attempting to liken his team’s competitive path to that of a certain NBA defending champion.
“I hear people say, ‘Why can’t (the Leafs) just be more like the Raptors?’ ” Dubas said. “And it’s a great story for us to tell our players, and to lean on and learn from. Because if you go back three or four years, what we’re going through now are similar things to what the Raptors were going through then and the questions about them.”
Um, no. These are not remotely comparable franchises — and not only because, to date, the Raptors are defined by their toughness and the Leafs by their lack thereof. Go back three or four years? Three years ago the Raptors were coming off what was then the greatest season in franchise history. They’d advanced to the Eastern Conference final, where they’d fallen to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers — only the eventual NBA champions. Four years ago they were winning 56 games and running up the secondbest record in the Eastern Conference. The Leafs have achieved nothing of the sort in the Shana-plan era, nothing Raptor-esque since the 1960s, when the NHL had six teams.
For Dubas to pretend otherwise while fluffing up his team’s narrative only diminishes the remarkable achievements of Masai Ujiri’s team. The Raptors are en route to enjoying home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs for a seventh straight season; the Leafs haven’t had home ice since 2004. The
Raptors, to a man, are born underdogs, the first team in NBA history to win a championship without a lottery pick on the roster. The Leafs are the opposite — purebred overdogs, a stacked collection of highly touted picks and highly paid golden boys who may or may not eventually fit together as a winning unit.
Which brings us back to the anxiety and panic currently gripping the centre of the hockey universe. If the Leafs were actually following a Raptor-esque trajectory, they’d already be better than this; certainly they’d play better defence than this.
That’s not to say the coming sprint won’t vault the Leafs into their fourth straight postseason in prime form; I’m betting it will. That’s not doubting they can do this. It’s just to say: This is a test. This is only a test. But it’ll be an actual existential emergency, and hardly Raptor-esque, if the Maple Leafs don’t rise to the moment.