Time for a new plan
Shanahan’s patience with the Core Four has run out. It’s about time
The dream is over, folks. Even Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan has lost faith in the Shanaplan — or, at least, in the players at the heart of it.
It was a little less than eight years ago that the Leafs, on an early season road trip in the rookie year of Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner, made a stop in Chicago, home of a Blackhawks team that had won the Stanley Cup in three of the previous seven seasons. And Mike Babcock, Shanahan’s hand-picked coach at the time, allowed his imagination to wander.
“To be honest with you, I’m hoping we’re a lot like Chicago was,” Babcock said.
If it sounds delusional now, back then it didn’t seem insane that a team built around Matthews and Marner could be the heirs to the cap-era dynasty Chicago built around Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. Certainly Babcock, and his cohorts in the Leafs organization, saw similarities. And, hey, the Leafs were a playoff team in the rookie year of Matthews and Marner. The Toews-Kane Blackhawks didn’t make the post-season in their first season together.
“They’ve had a real good run here,” Babcock said of the Blackhawks, “So we’d like to have a real good run. We’ve got lots of kids and we’re learning how to play, just like they were.”
The dream, it turned out, was of the pipe variety. Most of us finally figured that out a few years ago, probably around the time the Leafs were blowing a 3-1 lead to Montreal in the 2021 first round. Still, playoff disappointment followed playoff disappointment. The mirage of regular-season success restored hope in between. And so the Leafs repeatedly laid their bets on a team built around Matthews and Marner and William Nylander, along with 2018 addition John Tavares and long-serving No. 1 defenceman Morgan Rielly, for eight straight post-seasons.
Still, it wasn’t until Friday morning that Shanahan seemed to finally give up on the core of his roster after a seventh first-round flameout in eight seasons.
“I don’t question their dedication, but I do question just our ability as a group to get it done in those difficult times,” Shanahan said.
“And that’s why we have to make some changes.”
What changes? And how will they be made, given how all members of the Core Four, plus Rielly, possess no-trade provisions? Shanahan was short on details. Certainly there’ll be a new coach. But Shanahan made it clear that, after all these years of stubborn belief, something substantial has changed here.
Maybe it was the presence of the lofty ambition of new CEO Keith Pelley, who sat looking unhappy to Shanahan’s right. Maybe it’s the approach of the final season of Shanahan’s contract.
“There’s a time where you look at the age and the development of players and you’re talking about patience,” Shanahan said. “And then there comes a time when you see certain patterns and trends repeat themselves. Results repeat themselves. And that’s what we have to (analyze) this summer.”
Deciphering Shanahan’s corporate-speak is tiring. But to translate: Shanahan did not say, as he has annually until now, that he believes this core will get it done. Finally.
Was it a year too late? Without a doubt. Was it three years too late? Probably.
Now, it’s one thing to identify the need for change. It’s another thing to make it. Remaking the core in short order will be complicated business, potentially messy stuff. Making a significant trade will be tough. Winning it will be tougher. A superior window came and went last summer, before Marner’s trade protection kicked in, before Nylander’s contract was extended. But the debacle that was Kyle Dubas’s departure and general manager Brad Treliving’s arrival, both Shanahan productions, essentially created the coming summer of desperation. Suddenly, Shanahan is on the clock. And the question is simple: Can he save enough face and, more to the point, win enough playoff games to survive beyond his expiring contract?
Pelley expressed only a certain amount of faith while insisting the franchise’s overriding goal is to win the Stanley Cup.
“We’re not here to sell jerseys … Good is simply not good enough,” he said, suggesting another year of first-round futility could mean bigger changes. “Brendan and Brad know what they have to do this summer, and they’re the experts at it.”
Well, if we’re counting, Shanahan has won one playoff series in 10 years as an executive. Treliving has won two. “Experts” is as much a stretch as the contemplation of a Stanley Cup. Those Toews-Kane Blackhawks won 16 playoff rounds in their seven-season run of dominance. Shanahan once saw the seed of a championship team in his roster’s core, and held on to that vision longer than anyone else considered reasonable.
Now all that’s left is a salvage operation on a lost dream. Speaking of blurry vision: It’s hard to see how that’ll come out looking good enough.