For the first time in a decade, the Toronto Maple Leafs are playing out a stretch run with no playoff implications. While they haven’t been mathematically eliminated quite yet, the Leafs have been a dead team skating since the week after the Olympic break, when they vowed to make a late playoff push and then immediately face-planted to the tune of eight straight losses.
It’s over. This team stinks. Hello darkness, my old friend, and all that.
But that’s the twist this time, because it’s been 10 years since we’ve seen this story play out. Until the season ends, the Leafs still technically hold the league’s longest active postseason streak. Their fans haven’t had to endure a stretch run like this since 2015-16, the year the team flipped into tank mode in the spring and was rewarded with Auston Matthews.
That means there’s an entire cohort of young and/or new Maple Leaf fans who are in uncharted territory here. And they may not be sure how to handle it.
If that’s you, I have good news: There are plenty of crusty veterans like me who’ve been through this before. Oh, have we ever. There was a time when this kind of season used to be the Maple Leafs’ whole thing.
We might be going back to those days. So today, let me help you doe-eyed newbies with a few tips. Gather round, kids, grandpa’s got some advice. Let’s see how long he can last before he just ends up rambling about Wendel Clark.
Here are some tips on how to watch the Maple Leafs when there’s really no reason to watch the Maple Leafs. Choose one, or choose a few, and let’s see if we can get through this together.
Embrace the tank
We’ll start here because it’s both the most obvious option and also, for this year’s Leafs, the trickiest.
In a typical NHL season, a bad team will eventually reach a point where any hope of a playoff run has been lost, and at that point, it makes sense for its fans to start rooting against them. It’s no fun for anyone, but it’s how this works, at least until the league adopts a better system. High draft picks are valuable, and your lottery odds of getting one go up with each loss, so that’s what you root for.
It makes sense. Unless, of course, your team has been dumb enough to trade away their first-round pick.
The Leafs tend to do that kind of thing a lot, and this year it’s burned them. The pick they traded away — to a division rival, no less! — is top-five protected, meaning they’d need a near-total collapse down the stretch to end up keeping it. (And even that isn’t exactly great news, since it would leave their 2027 and 2028 picks completely unprotected.)
For now at least, Leafs fans can root for the tank. But even a couple of unexpected wins probably torpedo that plan.
My advice: Just accept that the Bruins are going to get the No. 6 pick. Any true Leafs fan should know that there was never any other scenario in play. We’ll have to find our rooting motivation elsewhere.
Focus on the youngsters
Another obvious one, and another that gets a little tricky for this year’s Leafs. Most bad teams are rebuilding to some extent, meaning they have a few good young players on the roster. Once wins and losses stop mattering, the attention turns to how those players are progressing.
But the Leafs aren’t rebuilding, yet, and years of trading away picks have left the cupboard relatively bare. Worse, Craig Berube is a veteran coach in an obvious lame-duck situation, and he’s at least partly coaching for his next job. He’s always been somewhat reluctant to play the youngsters, and it’s fair to say he’s not feeling super nurturing these days. So in terms of young pieces, there aren’t a ton in the lineup these days.
Not many, but also not zero. This is where Easton Cowan gets his chance to shine, or not. And as a fan, it’s up to you to decide which category he’s in based on each and every shift.
The same is true of Matthew Knies. He’s been good this year in a top-six role, but is there another level to his game? Let’s find out by putting the pressure of a long-suffering fan base on his shoulders for the next few weeks.
Mix in Nicholas “potentially the best brother if his last shift was a good one” Robertson and maybe another cameo from Dennis Hildeby, and there’s enough youth in play to hang some hopes on. But the youngsters aren’t the only ones worth paying attention to …
Pick a random guy to get way too invested in
Not a star. Not even a middle-six guy who’s been around for a while. You’re looking for somebody who’s relatively new on the scene. If you’d never heard of them until a few weeks ago, even better.
Now look closely. Do you see it? Where everyone else sees a bottom-six scrub, do you see the truth?
He is not a scrub. He is the chosen one. And he is your new favorite player, because he’s the one positive that’s going to emerge from this wreckage. He’s about to become a star.
We call this the Guy Larose Scenario, and it’s lots of fun. You get to spend the next few weeks unpacking a season’s worth of misery onto one set of shoulders. It will all be worth it, you can tell yourself, because it had to happen for us to discover This Dude.
And yes, there’s a reasonably obvious candidate on this year’s Leafs. That would be Bo Groulx, the career journeyman whose previous NHL experience had amounted to 65 games and one goal scored. The Leafs signed him last summer in an under-the-radar move, and after some solid AHL production, they finally decided to give him a shot in the big leagues.
He’s been unstoppable ever since, where for our purpose “unstoppable” means he’s scored a few goals. That’s fine. That’s all we’re looking for. Groulx is a good choice — almost too good. If you prefer, you could go with someone such as Dakota Joshua or Jacob Quillan. The key here is that you pick somebody who becomes Your Guy, and you will ride with them until the end of the season.
Enjoy it while it lasts, because it goes without saying that you will never hear from this player again.
We’ll pause here because you may have noticed a potential problem. You’re rooting for the youngsters, and one or two other semi-random selections, meaning you want them to play well. But we’ll also still be kind of rooting for the tank, meaning you don’t want anyone to play well. Will that lead to cognitive dissonance? Yes, it will, but that’s OK because you can pin it all on one guy …
Boyd Devereaux scored a hat trick in his final game of the 2009 season. (Claus Andersen / Getty Images)
Get irrationally mad at somebody for winning a game
I have never forgiven Boyd Deveraux.
Fun fact: That 2009 hat trick that dropped the Leafs two draft slots and ultimately cost Brian Burke the chance to build around Brayden Schenn and his brother Luke was the last NHL game Deveraux ever played. And rightly so, because he ruined everything. Stupid professionals, giving their best effort because that’s what they’re paid to do.
Where were we? Oh, right, the Leafs stink. Here’s another tip for watching them anyway.
Become an expert on body language
Did you notice that one guy who was kind of slumped over on the bench? Cool, congratulations, you’re a trained psychiatrist now.
This one works on any player, but it’s far more important for the guys who are signed past this season — which, luckily enough for you, is pretty much everyone on this year’s Leafs. What you’re looking for here is any indication that a player is quitting on his teammates or otherwise mentally packing it in. Once you see that, you know they’ve already got one foot out the door.
Basically, you’re looking for hanging heads, or pouting faces, or hunched shoulders. In the strictest technical terms, we’re watching for anything that can be described as “Kessel-ish.”
In other words, if anyone looks unhappy, that’s bad.
Also bad: anyone who does not look unhappy.
I mean, the season is a write-off. What do these guys have to smile about? Is losing fun for them? It shouldn’t be. Anyone who seems like they’re not miserable clearly doesn’t have a winning attitude.
So don’t be miserable, but also be miserable. If this sounds like a no-win situation that’s just going to make you madder and madder as you watch, then you’re probably ready to take the big step:
Embrace the hate-watch
It’s OK. You’ve earned it.
Or maybe more specifically, they’ve earned it. This Maple Leafs team wasn’t an especially likable bunch back when they were a playoff team. Now? Yikes.
They’re not good. They’re not well-run. They don’t even seem to like each other. So what’s a fan to do?
Simple: Embrace the hate-watch, where you openly root against your own team — not reluctantly, because of lottery odds, but proudly, because they deserve it.
Granted, this approach isn’t for everyone. Some fans just don’t feel right about it. And in Toronto, this sort of approach will only feed into the longstanding perception that overly critical Leafs fans are too hard on their team, since they’re the only fan base in sports that ever wants their team to actually win something.
But I’ve been there. Back in the Ballard years, for sure. In the aftermath of the Fletcher/Burns era, a little bit. In the dregs of the age of JFJ, absolutely. Did those teams deserve a hate-watch? Maybe yes, maybe no. Did it make me feel better? Honestly, it usually did, at least for a little while.
The point is, it’s an option. Or at least it should be. Maybe this year’s team doesn’t even deserve that much. Hate is still a form of passion, after all. Maybe you treat this team the way they treated their own captain when his knee got shredded by Radko Gudas, and pretend they’re not there. That’s an option too.
Don’t bother
There’s no law that says you have to watch this team at all. No, not even in the Code Of True Fans, despite what some might try to tell you. If you’ve made it to late March with this bunch, you’ve fulfilled any obligation you had to them. Over 70 games without quitting? That’s longer than most of the players made it.
So watch other teams. Pick a fun team or two and bandwagon them, if that’s your thing. Or just root for whoever’s playing against the teams you hate. Or embrace a tight playoff race and cheer for Team Chaos. Or watch the stretch run and the playoffs with no rooting interest whatsoever, and just enjoy some high-stakes hockey. That last one is especially fun if you can pull it off.
Or take a break from the NHL altogether. The PWHL is all sorts of fun. The MLB season starts this week, and the NBA playoffs are on the way. Get really into the NFL Draft. Or find a hobby, or read a book, or get caught up on that list of movies, or talk to those people who seem to live at your house and look like you, but smaller.
The point is, you have options, and at least some of them have to be better than watching this bunch stumble through three more weeks of misery. The key is that you don’t need anyone’s permission to take a break. You might even find that a lot of what you’d come to think of as fandom was just a force of habit.
Of course, there is one more option:
Just watch the Leafs for fun, without all the stress
If you ever figure out how to pull this one off, let me know. Until then, I’ll be over here watching Wendel highlights.