Florida Panthers center Sam Reinhart (13) tries to score against the Toronto Maple Leafs during the first period of Game 4 of a second-round NHL hockey playoff series, May 11, in Sunrise, Fla.Michael Laughlin/The Associated Press
Shortly after the start of the NHL’s Eastern Conference final, Florida Panthers coach Paul Maurice was doing his usual trick – unsettling an opponent with philosophy.
“I’m not a believer at all in momentum,” Maurice said. “I don’t think you establish anything. It’s all rear-view mirror, you look back at key moments in the series or something, if you win or if you lose.”
This is easy for the winner who has the momentum to say. On Saturday night, the Panthers went up 3-0 on the Hurricanes. They aren’t just beating Carolina. They’re embarrassing them.
It’s possible the Hurricanes will come out of this with the right lesson. That while their starless, tough-minded-but-not-actually-tough approach is great for the regular season, it’s not fit for purpose in the playoffs.
But I can almost guarantee you that the Leafs current management is getting the opposite, entirely wrong, message from the exact same data set.
The Leafs are chokers, but they are chokers of discernment. Four of the five last years, they’ve lost to the eventual Stanley Cup finalist. The one time they didn’t involved Boston, who then lost to Florida, who then won the title, making the Leafs Stanley Cup champions twice removed.
If you’ve ever wondered why the Leafs have become so inured to the status quo, this is why.
They never just lose lose. They lose with caveats.
It’s possible to break out the magnifying glass and reduce all of Toronto’s seven-game auto-destructs to one moment. If you had to pick one in the most recent instance, it was Sam Bennett braining Anthony Stolarz in Game 1, and the rest of the Leafs standing around watching. That was the moment Maurice and the Panthers would have known that while the Leafs had acquired some wolfish new personnel, they were all still sheep in their bones.
It’s irresistible to think and talk like this in Toronto, where Leafs chat is the conversational coin of the realm. What else are we supposed to talk about? Traffic?
Any talk that is ongoing 51 weeks of the year (aside from that one news cycle where the Blue Jays pack it in) is going to be granular. Granularity defies wholesale change. It encourages incrementalism.
So you don’t try to move an all-star centre who’s had nine kicks at the can and hasn’t managed to connect once. Instead, you leave the non-performing centre where he is and hope next time is different. Then you hire a cheap piece who would’ve gone over and beaten Bennett like a rug without needing to be told to do so. Problem solved.
This nitpicking way of going about things had one benefit – it kept everything calm. Above all, Toronto sports has come to prize executive serenity.
No one gets fired. On the odd chance they do, it’s only after an endless supply of second chances. Nobody should get too worked up about it because nothing is going to be different. There’s a plan and, sure, it’s not working, but we’re going to stick to it. Because the real enemy here is panic.
You could once have argued that that made some sense, in the Brian Burke, J.P. Ricciardi, Bryan Colangelo years, but the cultural pendulum has started making loop-the-loops. It’s time to inject some hysteria back into Toronto sports, and the Leafs in particular.
If the Leafs are what the team’s new overseer, Keith Pelley, has called them – “the greatest hockey team in the world” – everyone who oversees them should feel an urgency bordering on frenzy. If you can’t deal with that anxiety, or the media and fans being mean to you, you should find another place to work. This one isn’t for you.
Real Madrid is, by Pelley’s description, the soccer version of the Leafs. What happens when Real lose two years in a row? Everybody gets fired and the roster is shaken until all the loose parts fall out. It doesn’t matter what they cost or how hyped they were or what they once did. If you aren’t winning, you’re leaving. As a result, Real Madrid has won 75 trophies since the Leafs last won one.
This is harder to manage in a salary-cap environment yadda yadda yadda, but if you’re going to take ruthless performance targets out of it, GMs of hockey teams should make the same money as GMs of car dealerships.
In future, think less like the Florida Panthers or Tampa Bay Lightning. Those teams live in a different reality than the Leafs – zero local pressure, lower taxes, free to lose for years after they’ve won once.
Think more like Real Madrid – hire hard-minded players who don’t know how to lose, and then hold them to it by demanding immediate and permanent results. If the people you’ve got can’t provide them, don’t try to fix anybody. Release them into some other, low-pressure environment where they’ll be happy. Then go out and get other winning-fixated types. Don’t hire for skillsets. Hire for obsessiveness.
If the Leafs are serious about change the first thing they’ll do is bid adieu to Mitch Marner and John Tavares. It’s true that it is hard to find guys who score 100 points in the regular season, but it should be easy to find replacements who haven’t folded up like lawn chairs in the last seven playoffs. Only one of those things matters.
If either one of them is back, at whatever money, the Leafs are the same.
Making radical change on this team won’t be easy to do, but there ought be no excuse not to do it. Everyone can be traded. Every trade can be won. Anyone who wants to sit you down and explain why that isn’t the way it works does not belong at the greatest team in the world.
In future, the Leafs should put one idea above all others – no more explanations. No more jabber about culture or structure. No more jobs for life. No more star system. You either win, or you go.