Empty words not enough
Leafs leadership talks about change, but it’s still just talk about change
Since time immemorial — or at least time as measured in the era of Brendan Shanahan — we’ve heard repeatedly and ad nauseam about steps.
A step closer, getting nearer, almost there …
Players decanting out of the season, in their scrums earlier this week, reached for that reassuring phrase and catechism.
More steps trowelled together than the staircase leading up to Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal — there are 99 of those — and pilgrims should ascend on their knees, clutching a rosary.
Yet here we are again, with the Maple Leafs kneecapped in the first round of the playoffs.
A good Irish boy like Shanny may or may not click rosary beads. But the holy trinity that stared down reporters on Friday — Shanahan, GM Brad Treliving and incoming MLSE major-domo Keith Pelley — really offered little more than prayers and a vague avowal to make significant changes.
The litany is maddeningly familiar.
It’s on me, said Shanahan. It’s on me, said Treliving, who’s only been here a year. It’s on me, said Pelley, as he rabbited on about skill combined with chemistry and unity.
So far, the only noggin that got guillotined is that of sacked coach Sheldon Keefe.
Nor was there any strong indication that any other heads will roll once the assessing process is completed this summer. Shanahan appears safe as president, Treliving is too late to the dance to be held accountable, and Pelley … I don’t have a clue what role he intends to play. Except, on this occasion, to bolster the bona fides of the other blokes.
While I am not among the mob coming at Shanahan with pitchforks, a ripe opportunity was missed to specifically address the team’s chronic shortcomings, to name names for heaven’s sake, to call out the malingerers and the no-shows. To, in particular, apply the blowtorch on the likes of Mitch Marner and John Tavares so they’ll be more amenable to waiving their paralyzing no-trade clauses. Make this town, this team, a place they’d be glad to vacate.
Treliving could have done that, started building that pyre. But clearly he doesn’t wish to make a public spectacle of any individual. Even as everyone present acknowledged that this just can’t go on — not the team as constructed, not the goals-galore cast that curdles in the playoff crunch, not all of the marquee and fading star players that have for so long escaped without a scratch of blameworthiness.
“I don’t believe you throw a body on the tarmac just to say you’ve done something,” Treliving said.
But sometimes you have to throw a body out of the lifeboat to keep everybody else afloat.
Marner can’t be on this team next season to rack up 90-plus points in the regular campaign, then disappear in the post-season crunch. Tavares, so gleefully welcomed back home six years ago and invested with the captaincy, is quite evidently, as he nears his 34th birthday, on the decline. That’s not his fault. But sports is a pitiless business. What was a great snatch in 2018 is an albatross now.
Where the brass is in agreement, however, is that this troupe can’t take the stage in 2024-25. They’ve shown what they are. Believe them!
“There’s a time when you look at the age and the development of players and you talk about patience,” said Shanahan. “And then there comes a time where you see certain patterns and trends repeat themselves.
“What we are saying is that it has certainly become evident that we have to assess all of those things, assess whether or not we have to make some very difficult decisions over this summer to make the team better … assess from a different lens.”
Well, Lord knows what lens Shanahan had been peering through lo these many years of fizzling out, atop a patina of regular-season wonders. Through a glass darkly has offered an imperfect vision of reality, though he’s clung to the chimera, sold by the departed Kyle Dubas, of elite skill and speed and puck possession, embodied in a Core Four that eats up half the salary cap.
It was an intriguing concept and highly entertaining. But ultimately it’s been a bust. Even a dejected Auston Matthews, he of three Rocket Richard trophies, said the other day: “That stuff’s nice but it’s not fulfilling. It’s not what I’m after. It’s not something that I’m necessarily chasing after or makes me feel good. It’s about winning.”
Treliving will set his mind to deciphering why the Leafs just can’t score enough in the playoffs. “Is this systematic? Is it personnel?” Of course goals are harder to come by in the post-season but other teams, with far less shimmery talent, are managing it. The Florida Panthers pumped half a dozen goals past Boston’s ballyhooed tandem of Jeremy Swayman and Linus Ullmark on Wednesday.
Shanahan: “Everything is on the table.”
Better not be that old trick: Pull the tablecloth and everything on top stays put.