Maybe the Toronto Maple Leafs aren’t poorly coached, under-motivated or not yet fully “processed.”
Maybe the Leafs are just bad.
Because once you strip away the stats and expectations, they look bad. For short bursts – for instance, giving up a Keystone Kops goal immediately after blowing a 5-on-3 advantage – they look like they’ve pooled their money and bet against themselves.
If you didn’t come into Leafs games knowing who is supposed to be good and who isn’t, you might think 36-year-old journeyman Jason Spezza is the star of the roster. Because he’s often the only one who looks like he is a) trying and b) also using his brain while doing so.
On Tuesday, the Leafs got their doors blown off, their tires jacked and their engine block removed by the Pittsburgh Penguins. It was over halfway through the second.
Pittsburgh is a good team. But the Leafs were coming off an embarrassing loss to a bad team (Buffalo). You expected some jump. Instead, they gave up five straight goals before deciding to play keep-away for the remainder of the evening.
On the NBC broadcast, former NHLer Ben Lovejoy was laughing at them during the intermission: “I had a friend who used to say that playing against Toronto is good for your brand.”
Did he say that yesterday? Because that would make sense.
The most important player on the ice from Toronto’s perspective was Sidney Crosby. Not because Crosby played like he could’ve taken entire shifts on his own and still managed to get an assist. But because he is the sort of player the Leafs thought they were buying multiples of over the past couple of years.
You can’t expect Mitch Marner or John Tavares to be as good as the best player of his generation, but you do expect something in the same performance neighbourhood. At the absolute least, at the same level of nightly intensity. Eleven million bucks a year ought to buy you that much.
Crosby is 32 years old. He’s won everything there is to win and has been beaten like a piñata throughout most of his career. A lot of guys would’ve spent the past 10 years taking a victory lap.
The Leafs’ Big Four are 22, 22, 23 and 29 years old. Their trophy pantry is bare. They ought to be in the hungry upstart stage of their careers. None more so than Tavares, who had top billing with the Islanders, quit New York and has watched his former team get better while his new team gets slowly worse. Hans Christian Andersen wrote stories that touch on these themes.
But despite the disparity in youth and accomplishment, it’s Crosby who goes to work like an intern trying to make an impression. The Leafs’ Big Four are already in the feet-on-the-desk stage of their careers. And I suppose you can’t blame them for thinking that’s okay. Three of them make more money than Crosby.
A couple of months ago, the Leafs identified their problem: the coach. Too surly. Too boring. Too mean. The Leafs made sure everybody heard all about it once he was gone.
What we’ll remember best about Mike Babcock was five years of blather about “the process” – whose main purpose seemed to be that it never end.
The new coach came in with a make-friends-first approach. Sheldon Keefe was presented as the Justin Trudeau of the NHL – someone who understood the special pain of making a boatload of money to play hockey for a living. Keefe’s Sault Ste. Marie connection with GM Kyle Dubas was presented as proof of quality.
It’s hard to imagine the New York Yankees selling themselves as a big-league reboot of their Class-A affiliate. But this kind of upside-down logic works in Toronto, because it’s assumed here that every organization in hockey – from pee-wee on up – must be better run than the Leafs.
Keefe’s act worked for a while, but it’s looking a little ragged already.
“It looks like the process that we want to go through is to just get embarrassed enough to the point where we really just look in the mirror and recognize what’s required for us to compete at a high level at this stage of the season,” he said after Tuesday’s loss.
This is Babcockian “process” talk taking a dark turn. The Leafs have given up on paying their employees to do their jobs. They’re hoping the city shames them into working.
This is like your mechanic saying to you, “It’s not the car’s fault it doesn’t work. It’s your fault for not yelling at it enough.”
That’s one approach. It’s certainly one that puts the people most responsible for a non-functioning pro sports team (i.e., the ones who put it together) in the least danger of losing their jobs.
The other approach is starting from this basic principle: The Leafs are not good. They are incapable of becoming the sum of their parts, never mind more than that.
Dubas paid too much for four guys who aren’t doing what their inflated paycheques demand: winning games on their own.
Unfortunately, Tavares can’t play in net, and the rest of them refuse to play anything resembling defence. That’s the defencemen’s job. And they aren’t doing it either.
When you look around the league, the best teams have something in common: They feature stars who didn’t gouge their clubs out of contention.
The Boston Bruins are the Costco of hockey – you’ve got everything you need there, cheaper than anywhere else.
Crosby gave the Penguins a discount because – here’s a shocker – he likes living in Pittsburgh and he also likes to win.
Nathan MacKinnon is on US$7-million a year for the next four seasons. Right now, you’d trade him straight up for the four guys who’ve hung a golden anchor around the Leafs’ neck.
Two things can be true at once: Tavares, Marner, Auston Matthews and William Nylander are good players, and the Leafs are still a bad team.
Asking Toronto to scream them into being better isn’t doing the trick. It’s time to consider letting someone else, somewhere else, do the screaming instead.
Cathal Kelly