Joke’s on anyone making excuses
Season after season, the Leafs do what they did Monday: Pat each other on the back
And so it’s decided. It’s going to be a long autopsy, this latest dissection of another failed Maple Leafs season.
Team management won’t speak until Friday, the triumvirate of CEO Keith Pelley, president Brendan Shanahan and GM Brad Treliving on the witness stand. And perhaps the first question ought to be: How is it, a decade since Shanahan was brought aboard to rescue the Maple Leafs from their status as the hockey world’s perennial punchline, that the team is yet again a laughingstock?
Because, after losing their eighth playoff series in nine tries in the Shanaplan era, that’s what they are. Certainly Matthew Tkachuk, the Florida Panthers all-star, sees them in that light. A year after Tkachuk helped suck the joy from Leafland in a five-game, second-round dispatching, the Panthers’ driving force delivered another butt end to Toronto’s ribs in the lead-up to Florida’s second-round matchup with the Bruins.
“I think we all knew it was probably going to be Boston,” said Tkachuk, whose Panthers, after ousting Tampa Bay in five games, were waiting on the winner of the Leafs-Bruins series.
There’s a reason Tkachuk took that not-so-subtle shot at the Leafs. He is a gifted attention-seeker who loves to inflame a big market, and he knows he can attract this particular attention while simultaneously risking zero repercussions from the Leafs.
Nobody’s afraid of the Leafs, folks. And that’s in large part because, season after season, year after year, they do what they did Monday: In the wake of another franchise-defining loss, they pat each other on the back and insist they’re all great, while insisting all opinions to the contrary amount to delusional, inconvenient noise.
So far the only Leaf to acknowledge any explicit culpability in the latest first-round failure has been Sheldon Keefe, the head coach. You had to feel for him Monday when he opened his season-capping press conference appearing to fight back tears while delivering his statement of personal accountability.
Keefe, in the course of his confessional, essentially took responsibility for his best players’ inability to score goals in the playoffs, saying he needs to find ways to put them in better spots to do so.
And while it was laudable, it was also in some ways pathetic. Is it really Keefe’s fault that Auston Matthews, Mr. 69, has zero goals in six career winner-take-all playoff games? Is it Keefe’s fault that Matthews, who has scored at a career 53-goal pace in the regular season, scores at a 34-goal pace in the playoffs? Is it Keefe’s fault Mitch Marner, often in the 100-point neighbourhood in the regular season, moves to the 72-point neighbourhood in the post-season?
Keefe, who is trying to keep his job, will say whatever it takes. Fair enough. But this isn’t the first time he’s covered for underperforming players. On rare occasions when he has suggested Matthews and Marner need to be better, he has been mysteriously compelled to walk back those statements. In Toronto’s presiding diva culture, feelings get hurt. And those who hurt them pay.
Which, funny enough, makes Toronto even more of a laughingstock. It’s shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Keefe, as honourable as he sounded making excuses for his players on Monday, got beat in Saturday’s Game 7 by a counterpart who took exactly the opposite tack. Boston coach Jim Montgomery, in danger of blowing a 3-1 series lead to the Leafs — potentially a firing offence in merciless Boston given the Bruins’ 3-1 series squandering to Florida last year — called out his star player, David Pastrnak, and demanded better.
Therein lies the difference between Toronto and Boston. When Keefe has deigned to suggest Toronto’s best players be its best players, he has immediately backtracked. Montgomery did the same at the season’s biggest moment, and Pastrnak responded by scoring the overtime winner in Game 7.
He also lauded his coach: “I told (Montgomery), ‘If I’m the coach and you are me, I’d say the same thing,’ “Pastrnak said. “He’s trying to bring the best out of every single player, and he expects more. I just took it as a man and tried to be better.”
“I took it as a man.”
You need to go back a while to remember the last Leafs player to credibly claim that. What’s worse for the Leafs is that Montgomery let it be known that he’d spent the hours before Game 7 getting advice from a couple of old friends. One was Tampa Bay Jon Cooper, whose team beat the Leafs in a Game 7 in 2022. The other was Mike Babcock, who was fired by the Leafs in 2019 to make way for Keefe.
The Leafs, folks, are a punchline. And the joke is on anyone making excuses for a team whose pattern of playoff underperformance speaks for itself.