Dancing with their stars
Leafs will have to rely on Core Four as deadline deals fail to move needle
In watching the NHL trade deadline come and go without making needle-moving changes to the Maple Leafs, Brad Treliving sent a clear message to the longtime core of Toronto’s roster.
There are no playoff-hardened difference makers walking through the door. Treliving arrived in Toronto insisting “this can’t be about the Core Four,” but who’s kidding who? On the matter of whether the Leafs succeed or fail in the coming post-season, it will very much be about the Core Four.
“At the end of the day, a lot of the answers are going to come from the guys who are in the room,” Treliving said Friday. “That’s the reality of the situation. We’ve got a group that’s driven. We’ve got a group that’s hungry.”
The Leafs also have a group that, for the most part, Treliving isn’t responsible for assembling. After a deadline in which Treliving declined to part with either a firstround pick or top organizational prospects like Fraser Minten or Easton Cowan, the GM’s lack of faith in the crunch-time reliability of a team largely built by Kyle Dubas was never more outwardly apparent than it was Friday.
On a day Treliving acquired fourth-line forward Connor Dewar to complete an underwhelming pre-deadline period that also saw the acquisition of depth defencemen Ilya Lyubushkin and Joel Edmundson, the GM declined to even entertain the prospect that the Leafs are on a likely collision course with a first-round playoff matchup with the Boston Bruins.
“We’ve got to get into the playoffs. We’ve got to get in. That’s our main focus here right now, is qualifying,” Treliving said, bizarrely. “We’ve got some work to do yet. And we’ve still got some 20 games to go to get into the playoffs, and that’s goal number one.”
Fair enough, I guess. As of Friday, no NHL team was guaranteed to be in the playoffs — at least not technically, mathematically, officially. But let’s not be stupid here. Barring unspeakable calamity, the Leafs are going to make the playoffs. HockeyReference.com had their post-season probability as a 99 per cent lock Friday. Moneypuck.com had it at 99.2 per cent. That Treliving was somehow expressing concern the Leafs could still blow it says something about his belief in what his predecessor assembled.
Why would Treliving use his future draft and prospect capital to slap yet more deadline duct tape on Dubas’s fundamental mistakes? Why would Treliving take undue risk to vindicate Dubas’s ill-advised vision?
Given how Treliving was hastily introduced as Leafs GM on June 1, an 11th-hour arrival that put him in a difficult spot to make well-considered changes in a truncated off-season, why would Treliving now take undue risk to try and help this particular iteration of the Maple Leafs?
It’s true that a desperate Dubas poured many of his available resources into a post-season push last year. But at least those 202223Leafs had proven themselves as a credible defensive team, finishing the regular season in seventh in goals against per game.
This year, the defensive details have been slipping, as seen in this week’s pair of losses to the Bruins by a combined score of 8-2. Coming into Friday, the Leafs were 20th in the league in goals against per game. With one playoff series win in seven playoff appearances, the Matthews-Marner Maple Leafs have a built a well-earned reputation for coming up small when the moments get big.
So you can’t really blame Treliving for eyeing this dressing room with considerable suspicion, dubbing the Leafs “a work in progress” Friday. On one hand, he wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t see them that way.
On the other, while this is Treliving’s first year with the Leafs, this is Toronto’s 56th season since it last won a Stanley Cup. And given the randomness of the NHL, given the unpredictability of goaltending streaks and injury luck, there’s a valid argument that every season ought to be approached with maximum managerial abandon, especially when the greatest goal scorer in franchise history is operating in his prime, and both Mitch Marner
and William Nylander are making a push for career years.
Now, to be clear, it’s not as though Treliving did nothing before the deadline. Adding depth defencemen in Edmundson and Lyubushkin might make the Leafs a little sturdier in front of their own net. And Edmundson and Dewar, especially, might pull Toronto’s dismal penalty kill a little closer to respectability. But taken together, the trio hardly moved the needle.
The lack of impactful additions doesn’t exactly bode well for Toronto’s chances of playoff advancement. A year ago, the Leafs only managed to travel beyond the first round of the playoffs for the first time in 19 years after Dubas turned over 33 per cent of the skaters in the lineup at the deadline, acquiring the likes of Ryan O’Reilly and Jake McCabe in a flurry of trades that also brought aboard Luke Schenn, Noel Acciari, Sam Lafferty and Erik Gustafsson. Only after that injection of oomph did the Maple Leafs beat the Lightning in six games.
So there was an argument to be made that, considering only McCabe is still around from that group and that the Leafs haven’t exactly filled in all the holes left by the exodus of the rest of those players, a similarly aggressive deadline approach would only be appropriate.
Treliving had counterparts around the league bent on making impressive deadline impact. In a week that saw the defending Stanley Cup champion Vegas Golden Knights acquire a top-four defenceman in Noah Hanifin and a forward with scoring punch in Anthony Mantha, Friday’s buzzer-beating deal in which Vegas landed Tomas Hertl changed the league’s competitive landscape almost instantly, at least in the eye of sports bettors.
The Golden Knights’ odds to win the Stanley Cup improved from the league’s sixth favourite to co-favourites alongside Florida and Edmonton in at least one sportsbook.
Vegas’s odds have since fluctuated. Toronto’s have not. They’ve been stable all week at 14-to-1 to win the Cup in many books, ninth in the oddsmakers’ pecking order. Given that Toronto’s GM couldn’t be sold on the merits of a high-end investment to help the cause, it’s not only the bookies who view the Leafs as a relative long shot.