Why aren’t Leafs fans baying for blood? Because the reality of starting anew is too tough to take

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Two down, 179 to go. Days, not games, until the end of the regular-season schedule for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

After back-to-back nights to kick things off, we’ve got a small sense of how this NHL season will go for the Leafs. Choppy, with occasional tsunamis.

They won one and lost one, which is about as average as it gets. But even when this team is trying to be low-key, it can’t help but Kool-Aid Man its way into every conversation.

The first mistake the Leafs made – allowing the Toronto Blue Jays to implode.

If the baseball team were still in the playoffs, that would’ve bought the Leafs a couple of weeks to ease into the season. But when’s the last time either of these clubs has been that lucky?

Their second mistake – the goalie controversy.

The Leafs don’t trust themselves, so they bought two new goalies instead of one. That move might work in Anaheim. But in Toronto it’s like pulling a fire alarm and then standing under the sprinklers saying, “What fire?”

There was only one possible way this going to start out the way Toronto hoped. So it went the other way. Matt Murray wasn’t great on Wednesday, and then Ilya Samsonov was just good enough on Thursday to make you wonder why Murray gets automatically jumped to the front of the line.

If Murray isn’t a human force field against his old team, the Senators, on Saturday night, then the Leafs have a problem. The most easily foreseeable problem in NHL history.

“We just take things one day at a time, like usual,” Murray said after losing the opener in Montreal.

You know the “like usual” is a verbal tic, but you still want to tell him there is no “like usual” here. There will be no breaks, no mulligans, no letting things slide, no room for improvement, no feeling it out. The only way Murray is getting any breathing space is if he’s an all-star immediately.

If Wednesday was Murray’s “like usual,” those 179 days are going to feel like 179 months.

Then, bubbling under that, there’s the coaching controversy.

The Leafs’ story has been stuck on repeat for so long – talk big, lose bigger, stay the course – that it no longer seems as though change is possible.

Why aren’t the fans offering their usual constructive criticism (i.e. baying for blood)? Because the sunk-cost fallacy has taken hold. You invested five years in more-or-less the same group, and can’t bear the idea of starting again.

That attitude has had a soporific effect on Leafs’ management. Even after the worst of the team’s recent losses, you never felt any anxiety from them. Resignation, maybe. But no existential dread.

Until this week.

The first ripple was Vegas putting Sheldon Keefe on the shortest odds (13 to 2) to be the first NHL coach fired this season.

Does Vegas have the inside dope? No, but it does have a morbid sense of humour.

Suggesting something bad about the Leafs has a way of conjuring that bad thing into reality. This is why the Leafs hockey media is so dangerous. They don’t demand things be done. Instead, they wonder aloud why things haven’t been done. If a consensus forms then – presto! – that thing often comes to pass.

Putting it out there that Keefe is in mortal professional danger – even when no one has suggested that’s possible and he remains bound to the GM – makes it real. The line gets repeated. Keefe cannot avoid hearing about it. And then the Leafs go face-first out of the starting gate.

Afterward, Keefe was very clear about whose fault that was – not Matt Murray’s, and not his own.

On Murray: “I thought our guys hung him out to dry.”

On Toronto’s inability to stop the Montreal rush: “We talked about that this morning. We talked about it before the game, and fed right into it.”

Keefe’s MO is as a players’ coach, a guy who does not criticize people in public. He was brought on in part to be the anti-Mike Babcock.

Keefe’s message out of the first game – ‘Don’t blame the goalie and do not even think about blaming me’ – represents a change in approach. That it happened right from the off does not seem like a coincidence.

When Babcock was fired three years ago, it wasn’t a shock, but it was still a surprise. Everyone figured he had limitless rope within the organization (as it turns out, so did Babcock, which is what did him in).

It’s been a long time since there’s been a proper, slo-mo Leafs meltdown, complete with Game of Thrones-style palace intrigue. The sort of thing you can see coming from a long way off. You have to reach back to the end of the Brian Burke era for that sort of drama – nearly a decade ago.

Every one of these is different but they have one thing in common – the search for blame. If fans and media can agree on someone to hang things on, matters devolve quickly.

The Leafs have navigated the disappointments of the past few years by denying people a focal point for their frustration. Babcock was dismissed before a consensus could form that he was that person.

But now Leafs followers have begun their triangulation. Murray, who’s only trying to do his job, is an obvious target. Keefe is another. And above them both, GM Kyle Dubas.

It’s clear that if this regular season does not go magnificently – not really well, not very good, but magnificently – bad things will happen to good people.

Circumstances have aligned in such a way that it won’t take much. A four-game losing streak; one humiliating loss at home; an ill-judged word at the wrong time. The Leafs are one of the best teams in hockey and the Leafs are primed to blow. Only here is that possible.

You know it’s happening because two days into this thing, you can already see those stuck in the fanbase’s overlapping fields of fire trying to edge their way to safety. If those people are beginning to suspect something’s happening, then it is happening.