Window to change core is closing
Toronto’s GM-less franchise is careening toward crossroads without a steering wheel
So the Florida Panthers are going to play for the Stanley Cup. This is a rare enough sentence that you could sell it in an antique store; the last time it was written was during the last great decade, in 1996, in a Panthers run that is historically defined by plastic rats. Man, they loved those plastic rats.
Anyway, these Panthers nearly died in the regular season, needed a tanking Chicago team to beat Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin on the road, and have won 11 of 12 since falling behind 3-1 to one of the best regular season teams ever built. The one loss was to the Toronto Maple Leafs.
So do you feel any better, if you are a Leafs fan? The Panthers win onegoal games like the 1993 Montreal Canadiens, eight in a row now, three in overtime and one in the fourth OT. Their overpaid goalie is suddenly Tretiakian, and just threw up a .971 save percentage in a fourgame sweep. Carolina was so frustrated that Brent Burns took a stick to Matthew Tkachuk’s cojones, only to find those cojones are becoming legendary.
So maybe Leafs fans should feel relieved. They lost to a buzzsaw.
Except the buzzsaw may have torn the Leafs apart by not breaking them up at all. Yes, this was the most successful Leafs season since 2004. Yes, Florida appears to be a team of swamp-adjacent destiny.
But the Leafs are currently flailing into their future, in a way that didn’t happen when this franchise lost to a big-time team before. And lord, it’s happened. The Capitals team Toronto lost to in 2017 won the Cup the next year, and a Leafs fan could feel good about that. The Bruins team that beat Toronto in 2019 — and 2018, for that matter — went to the Cup final, and lost to Ryan O’Reilly’s Blues in seven. The Montreal team that beat Toronto in 2021 soldiered on to the Cup final, and that really was the unforgivable one, because it should have been the Leafs.
And last season Tampa Bay was the two-time defending champs, and went to their third straight Cup final, and frankly the Leafs probably deserved to win that series. They were right there, and Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews did everything but score in Game 7, and some misguided fools argued that this team should run it back despite all the failures, one more time, again.
Then Matthews and Marner were awful in that must-win Game 3 in Florida. Watch it again and they looked like guys who thought they were working hard, and who let things get in their way. Within two weeks, general manager Kyle Dubas was gone, and the Leafs had been thrown into their current situation, with heartbroken employees, a GM search that is still unfolding, and a franchise that is careening toward the crossroads without a steering wheel.
And in years past you could convince yourself this core would figure it out, and last year more than ever. When the team the Leafs narrowly lost to went deep, Leafs fans and executives alike could tell themselves, that could have been us. Stick with it.
Except this year, can that possibly be what you want? Any Core Four trade would be difficult, under any circumstances. John Tavares has a full no-move clause and will use it. Any other star trade is by definition hard: getting equal value, working under a deadline, and trying to give this team more big-game offence by trading big-time offensive players. Oh, and the Leafs don’t have a general manager to do any of this, of course.
But you can’t bring these guys back, can you? The window is tight: on July 1 Matthews and Marner get no-move clauses, and William Nylander’s trade list is reduced to 10 teams of his choosing.
Except, as reported by Chris Johnston, the Core Four came away from phone calls with Brendan Shanahan after the Dubas firing thinking none of them would be moved before July 1. Maybe that was simply to calm the waters. Maybe Shanahan, who still wanted Dubas back until Thursday of last week, wasn’t in a position to say anything else.
But combined with Shanahan’s proviso in his Friday press conference — when faced with Dubas’s previous statement that everything would be on the table, Shanahan cautioned that decisions might not happen on other people’s timelines — and it seems ever more likely Toronto misses their best window to change the Core Four.
Maybe it’s just not plausible, with no GM and the current chaos. But after July 1 Matthews could walk to free agency without a deal and under a new regime, Marner and Tavares could forestall any moves, and the Leafs might only be able to explore a Nylander deal. And that would be in the final year of his contract, meaning he holds the leverage even beyond those 10 teams on his list.
Unless you believe this Core Four deserves another chance, it sure looks like this franchise meltdown happened at the worst possible time. Florida reaching the final doesn’t help because of the way the Leafs lost — kept to the perimeter too often, victims of their own worst habits in Game 1, and maybe crumpling under accumulated pressure of this franchise. Some of that, of course, is self-inflicted.
So now the pressure is on Shanahan. Former Flames GM Jim Treliving is said to be the favourite, and maybe he is. That would mean experience, a man who has worked in a Canadian market, and replacing a GM who won one first-round series in five years with a GM who won two first-round series in nine years in Calgary, and had to trade away the guy who has helped propel the Panthers to the Stanley Cup final.
Maybe it will be another GM who has to hit the ground at high speed, with 10 free agents and a lame-duck coaching staff and big questions in the air. The Leafs as we knew them are both in more jeopardy than they have ever been, and may be closer than ever to not moving an inch, at their core. And it’s hard to feel great about it.