The questions are being thrown around and they’re very simply put.
Where do you go from here?
Who do you move and who do you keep?
How do you get BETTER?
I’m going to tell you, via one of PuckinLeafs’ favourite quotes from yesteryear. “History tells us that…”
The GM
Oh boy, this is a doozie, isn’t it? Brad Treliving must go to bed every night thinking “why does this always happen to me?” First he allowed Johnny Gaudreau to walk away from Calgary for nothing. From there Matt Tkachuk figured, what the hey, I may as well leave too. He held Treliving’s feet to the fire and eventually he was dealt to the Florida Panthers. At first it looked as if the Flames did well in that trade. MacKenzie Weegar was a player that was flirting with top pair capabilities. Jonathan Huberdeau was coming off a 115pt season. Cole Schwindt was flirting with making the NHL and was just 21 years old and they landed a 2025 1st round selection that was later used to select Cullen Potter.
From there things went poorly. Huberdeau’s production plummeted, Schwindt hasn’t progressed as expected and has found his way back into the Florida Panthers organization and Weegar, well, Weegar has actually been pretty good. His stats have taken a beating this season, but the Flames are terrible and it appears that he’s about to be traded. The return from Weegar and potential of Potter are all that is left from the return that Treliving received.
Fast forward to today.
Brad Treliving has allowed yet another star winger to walk away from his new organization for next to nothing. Nicholas Roy is something, yes, but he is far less than what they should have received. Now it feels as if we are simply waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The reason that it feels like that? Well, Brad failed to acquire a single valuable asset with the capspace that Mitch Marner left behind. Instead, he spent assets on the “salary dumps” that are Matias Maccelli and Dakota Joshua and kinda just sat on his hands ever since. Now we’re waiting for the season to end to see how high the pick that they traded to Boston Bruins will be, while we watch games that have no meaning and Leafs Nation grows increasingly restless.
Which begs the question. If you were Auston Matthews, being booed off the ice with this GM and this Head Coach, would you be interested in continuing your career as a Toronto Maple Leaf?
I feel that, if I were Auston and I were from the sunny state of Arizona, I would absolutely feel honoured to have been a Leaf for so long, but I’d also have a desire to play in a popular U.S. city. I feel this way because I think if I were an NHLer that was drafted by any team in the U.S. I would feel the desire to return to Canada some day. I don’t blame him if that’s what he chooses to do. All that I ask is that he doesn’t do what Mitch Marner did, which was give Leafs management a single team in which he was willing to be traded to, leaving the team that drafted him with no leverage in the deal.
Just work with the team to help you find a new home. It’s really that simple.
Which begs the next question. Would anybody in their right mind trust Brad Treliving to make this trade? History tells us that he isn’t the man for the job. His aim in the Tkachuk trade was to stay competitive and I can easily envision that, when Matthews is on the trade block a year from now, it will be a similar situation. The highest of higher ups will descend from their perch atop Rogers Communications and declare a full rebuild unprofitable. “We’re not here to sell jersey’s, but you need to trade Matthews for a player whose jersey the fans would like to buy.”
That sort of thing.
So, where do we go from here?
Unfortunately it’s too close to the deadline to put anybody else in the GM’s chair. Treliving has to navigate things over the next 5 days. As of Saturday morning though? Brad Treliving should be given his walking papers, it’s that simple.
The Head Coach
Craig Berube was supposed to be the guy that brought accountability to the locker room. Instead, we watch as William Nylander tries to dangle through 3-4 opposing players, turns the puck over, fails to backcheck and then floats to the bench after the other team scored like nothing happened.
The response? Berube then benches Easton Cowan, because how dare he!!
His system is flawed, his yelling is background noise to the players at this point and his solution after the latest loss is to publicly call out the players for not playing with heart OR brains.
I’m not even sure why he’s still employed at this point. I can guarantee you that if I worked for somebody that was running a subpar business and they said it was my fault the company was falling being because I wasn’t working hard enough and called me an idiot, I’d look to jump ship at the first possible opportunity. Make no mistake, players are still people and this is the equivalent of what Craig Berube did this week.
Either way, history tells us that once a coach loses the room he doesn’t get it back. That gives us step 2, fire the coach.
The Roster
Now, I’m not going to run through all of the players. We did that already over the past few weeks. I’ve already given my opinion on Matthews anyway and everything hinges on him. If he asked for a trade today you’d see Nylander ask tomorrow, while Knies may not be far behind. He’s what’s keeping hope alive in the organization and within the room.
What we do have to consider is, again, the two year time limit that his very possible departure gives to the organization. Basically, the team needs to be a contender next season if they have any chance at keeping #34.
Here’s the rub. The Leafs don’t have a 1st round pick this year. Or next. It’ll be 2028 before they own their own 1st round pick again and that could be directly after the first year post-Papi. What is worse is they don’t have a 2nd or 4th this year either. They have a 3rd round selection and thats their only pick in the first 4 rounds of the draft while they sit in the bottom 3rd of the NHL standings.
Next year? They have a 2nd round pick and that serves as their only selection in the first three rounds. Oy vey!!
How do you make a team competitive in a single offseason, with no picks to trade, no young players on the way and no incentive to attract free agents?
Maybe, and I mean MAYBE, the next GM will have a chance, depending on who that man is. However, if Brad Treliving is still here then the answer to that question is “they don’t.”
They simply can’t make this team competitive in a single offseason. It would take years to fill the holes that are on this roster and they don’t have years left to do that before their key player is off in search of a new opportunity.
That’s also what history tells us. Quinn Hughes didn’t see a future in Vancouver, so he left. Johnny Gaudreau and Matt Tkachuk didn’t see a positive future in Calgary, so they left. John Tavares saw a brighter future in Toronto, so he left. Erik Karlsson didn’t see a future in Ottawa, so he left.
It’s not always a case of the organization not wanting to sign a player. Sometimes a player just looks ahead at a bleak future and wants to move along. It has to be a fit for the player and the team and recent examples of where that fit didn’t cross over are Steven Stamkos, Artemi Panarin, Brad Marchand, Mikko Rantanen, Mitch Marner and, if I were a betting man (and I am), Auston Matthews will soon join this list.
Conclusion
Things in Toronto right now are very, very simple.
Keith Pelley is pulling the strings and he isn’t a hockey man. They need a president of hockey operations and they needed one yesterday. This person is key, just as Brendan Shanahan was. You can look back and criticize Shanahan all you want, but he brought hope and respect to the organization for at least a few years and that’s something that had been missing for decades. The players and assets he brought to the organization could have been signed or traded in a different way and it could have made the Leafs a true contender, but the chips fell the way they did and we can’t do anything about that now. The point is, they need somebody with vision and balls in this position and I have a few names that I’d be interested in, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Brad Treliving was a poor choice to be the GM from the start and the way he has built the team to date shows that. They need the new President to choose the new GM, ideally, but I don’t even feel like they intend to bring in a proper President, so what happens with Treliving is anybody’s guess. However, we’re dealing with what should happen, not what will happen and Treliving should be fired.
Craig Berube can go anytime. I had hope that he would work out but he hasn’t.
At that point, where do they go? I hate to admit it, but a full tear down is going to be forced onto the organization, so the best bet is to get ahead of it while their star players still have terms and value.
If you don’t agree with this I’m sorry, but history tells us that organizations with poor Presidents, poor GMs and poor Head Coach’s end up with poor results, which in turn leads to star players that want out and, eventually, those organizations rebuild (not retool). It’s the only way forward.