The Toronto Maple Leafs are slowly drifting toward mediocrity

Originally, I wanted to write on this topic a month or two ago, shortly after the Toronto Maple Leafs had hired Craig Berube. I was told to wait and see how the busiest points of the offseason played out for them before writing this.

In hindsight, I’m glad I did.

It’s not that I think the Leafs had a bad offseason by any means. I think it went okay, and while they didn’t make any egregiously bad moves, they did make a lot that could have been better. Whether it’s too much money or term on a contract, or just some uncertainty around the players brought in, I think the changes they made have just as much of a chance of going poorly as they do going well.

That’s the problem with the Leafs at this point in time: they seem to be trending towards mediocrity, both in terms of the on-ice product and how they manage the team off the ice. For a team that even at their peak saw weaknesses get exposed in the playoffs, drifting toward the murky middle of the league isn’t going to do them any favors.

And for a team whose salary cap strategy involves paying Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, John Tavares and Morgan Rielly as much as they do, they need to be diligent with spending elsewhere, something that general manager Brad Treliving does not inspire the utmost confidence in.

For the record, this is not in reaction to the Leafs not moving on from Marner. While that’s largely been the move that Leafs fans have wanted to see, I’m not even going to pretend like I know what the Leafs should do there. Marner has consistently underperformed in the playoffs, so it does make sense to move on and try something new, but it also feels insane to trade a player who consistently produces 90 points and plays Selke-caliber defense. It just seems like a lose-lose situation.

On top of that, the focus of this post is not, “Brad Treliving bad, Kyle Dubas good.” Dubas’ tenure was the most consistent out of any Leafs general manager during the salary cap era. Even some of his most egregious errors like the Nazem Kadri trade or letting Zach Hyman walk to free agency are moves that only look as bad as they do in hindsight. You can at least look back to his thought process at the time and understand the logic behind why he made those moves, even if you didn’t agree with them.

But at the same time, Dubas had his fair share of flaws. He seemed to rely heavily on the offense coming from the top six and would usually fill out the bottom six with “safe” players who drove play and were good defensively, even if that came at the expense of offense. That played a big role in their playoff struggles, as their depth never generated the offense they needed in those moments, and that allowed the opposing teams to throw all of their top shutdown players at the Leafs’ top six. On top of that, his time with the Pittsburgh Penguins thus far has been largely underwhelming, which is a bit concerning now that he has full control of the team.

I also think some aspects of Treliving’s management were improvements on Dubas’ flaws. The best example is that Treliving isn’t afraid of acquiring players that can provide some offensive upside at the expense of their defensive flaws. Last offseason, he signed Tyler Bertuzzi and Max Domi, who are much better offensively than they are defensively, and it provided the Leafs with some flexibility up front to either stack up the top six lines, or spread the depth across their top nine, sometimes even to the point where their four elite forwards could be on different lines.

However, it’s a bit ironic that Treliving had managed to fix the Leafs’ biggest problem in the postseason by doing that, because in his eyes, that wasn’t the problem with the Leafs. That’s the part about Treliving’s tenure in Toronto that is most concerning. He talked about bringing more snot to the Leafs’ lineup, and his hyper focus on improving that has created the biggest flaws with this team at the moment.

The biggest example is what’s happened with the Leafs blueline. When the Leafs were at their peak in this current era of the franchise from 2020 to 2023, they were one of the best teams at suppressing expected goals with a 2.32 5v5 expected goals against per 60 minutes that ranked sixth in the league. In just one season under Treliving, that rate dropped to 2.62, which was 16th in the league.

Now, that isn’t all on Treliving. Between Jake Muzzin‘s career-ending injury, Dubas trading away Rasmus Sandin, and T.J. Brodie and Mark Giordano seeing their play fall off last season, Treliving was in a tough spot. But at the same time, his solutions to start the season were John Klingberg, who was defensively inept in his brief playing time before his injury shut him down for the season, and Simon Benoit, who struggled in the playoffs after a solid regular season. Treliving needed to do more at the trade deadline, and his solutions were adding more size on the blueline in Ilya Lyubushkin and Joel Edmundson, who were passable at best in their zone but struggled with moving the puck up the ice.

Treliving attempted to improve the blueline again this summer by acquiring Chris Tanev, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, and Jani Hakanpaa, making their defense group look much better on paper. Tanev is an upgrade for their top four barring any injuries. While Ekman-Larsson can be inconsistent defensively, I’ll reserve judgment on him until I see how he performs on the team, especially with him just coming off a solid performance with the Florida Panthers last season, albeit primarily in a bottom-pairing role. On the other hand, the Hakanpaa addition is a bit more questionable, as he’s more or less the same type of big defenseman who doesn’t bring much else to the table that they already tried with Lyubushkin and Edmundson.

But the Tanev and Ekman-Larsson acquisitions highlight a different issue with the new regime: they aren’t nearly as careful with their spending as they should be. Tanev is worth his cap hit, but six years is a long time to invest in a 34-year-old, especially for one that gets hurt a fair amount. Sure, he can be LTIRed, but signing a bad contract banking on a player retiring before a contract ends just sounds like a bad idea waiting to happen. Meanwhile, Ekman-Larsson has a reasonable cap hit, but signing him until he’s 36 when we’ve already seen what aging does to his play is a risky gamble to make. Considering we’ve witnessed Treliving’s instances of carelessly handing out term to Ryan Reaves and David Kampf backfire, there’s a reason to be skeptical.

This is a problem that stems back to Treliving’s tenure with the Flames as well. Troy Brouwer, Mason Raymond, Michael Stone, James Neal, Sean Monahan, Deryk Engelland, the list goes on. Treliving has signed a fair amount of contracts that either looked like a bad idea from the start, or aged poorly during the deals. It’s not the end of the world, but when you have more than $50 million invested in five players, you must be more diligent around the margins. That was another aspect of Dubas’ tenure that he did a much better job with.

Between the inconsistent logic and the careless spending, you already have the makings of a mediocre team. The moves aren’t bad enough to hamper the Leafs, but they aren’t good enough for me to feel great about their Cup chances, especially compared to past teams. But, sometimes, you can overcome those issues with a really good coach.

But the Leafs don’t have that. Berube was cited as the dream hire for the Leafs for some reason, largely because of his Cup win and the idea that he can hold players accountable. I’m not going to say that the Leafs shouldn’t have fired Sheldon Keefe, as I think that he had run his course in Toronto and struggled to adjust in the playoffs, but I don’t know if Berube is as much of a hot commodity that many believed him to be.

Expected Goal Metrics by Berube-coached teams

While a Stanley Cup win does spruce up Berube’s resume, the rest of his head coaching career at the NHL level has been mediocre at best. In his eight seasons as a head coach, only the 2018-19 Blues have finished top 10 in 5v5 expected goal share, and only the 2019-20 have finished top 10 in either 5v5 expected goals for or against per 60. There’s also a noticeable trend of his Blues teams getting worse defensively during his tenure, although some of that can also be attributed to the personnel. Credit where it’s due, they did see improvement when he joined in 2018-19 for their Cup win, but that was also a talented roster that would inevitably improve after a slow start, and they also got a lot of help from some hot goaltending from Jordan Binnington.

Now, Berube has never worked with players as talented as Matthews, Marner or Nylander, so maybe that will change how he approaches his tactics. Maybe the Leafs’ talent will elevate the rest of the team above the mediocre results that Berube’s teams have produced so far in his career. Or maybe Berube just gives the core players the kick in the ass they need to finally produce in the playoffs. We won’t know until we see it on the ice, but based on what we know, Berube probably won’t provide the impact many seem to think he will.

To reiterate, I don’t think the Leafs are in bad shape. Nothing has happened in the past year that comes close to the levels of ineptitude seen from this franchise in recent history. But this team did take a step back last season from Cup contender to merely a competitive playoff team, and nothing that has happened this summer has really made me believe that they’ll return to the former.

There are a lot of new parts coming into the team, so we’ll wait and see what happens on the ice. But all signs point to another season where, barring some luck, they’ll finish in third in their division or in a Wildcard spot, and probably flame out in the first round again. That’s far from the worst-case scenario, but it just feels like a waste when you have some of the most talented players in franchise history in their prime.

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