Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Brandon Carlo deflects a shot on goal as goalie Joseph Woll follows the puck in the third period of Saturday’s 5-2 loss to the Ottawa Senators at the Canadian Tire Centre in Kanata, Ont.Marc DesRosiers/Reuters
After dithering over it for a while, the Toronto Maple Leafs have decided that, yes, they will tank after all, thanks very much.
On Saturday night, they visited Ottawa, coming off a goalie-abetted downer the night before. What’d they do? They took out the other goalie. Anthony Stolarz was hit in the neck during warm-ups. He had to leave the game before he’d technically entered it.
What’s next? Are they going to start cutting each other’s brake lines?
With Stolarz out, it was back to the guy who let you down the night before. Joseph Woll looked more like he was break dancing in front of a crowd than playing a sport. It didn’t help that the Leafs allowed the Senators 30 more shots than they had.
Ottawa Senators dominate Maple Leafs in 5-2 victory
At this point, all the nonsense about pro athletes being incapable of playing badly on purpose is out the window. This club is out there skating laps, and not hot ones.
Their white-flag moment was five of them standing around watching Auston Matthews get Nancy Kerrigan’d and doing nothing about it. Yes, I’m counting the goalie. He’s out there in a jersey, isn’t he?
There are only two explanations for letting your captain get knee-capped with zero response – either you are so checked out that you no longer recognize the core tenets of hockey culture, or you hate the guy. I’m not sure which is worse.
Once that happened, this team was finished. Not the season. The team. A draft pick is not going to solve that problem.
The Leafs’ current plan seems to be surviving this epic defeat, gathering up some recruits over summer and then convincing everyone that victory is still assured. How does that work exactly?
Let’s say Matthews comes back with medium-term memory loss and doesn’t recall that everyone on this club pushed him out of the moving getaway car. Let’s say William Nylander meets the Ghost of Hockey Future and decides he doesn’t want to be remembered as the most talented part-timer in NHL history. Let’s say Morgan Rielly cracks time travel in the off-season and returns to camp at 24 years old.
Maple Leafs captain Matthews undergoes knee surgery
Let’s say all that. And then what? It’s still the same team that went from Stanley Cup favourites to imagining the freedom at the draft lottery in the space of six months.
Getting an 18-year-old right-handed-shot defenceman fifth overall isn’t going to change any of that. I don’t care if he’s Bobby Orr. Whatever contribution he is going to make to this club’s moribund culture is years off. If the Leafs did pick a winner, the likeliest outcome is that they’d spend the next two or three seasons crushing his spirit.
What the Leafs are in the midst of now isn’t a tank or a rebuild or a continuation of the ‘win now’ policy. It’s all of those things together.
Currently, it’s a tank. It will continue to be a tank if and until they get down to fifth-worst in the NHL, where their 2026 first-round pick is protected. If they manage that, it’ll be a tank until the draft. Then, all of a sudden, it won’t be a tank any more. It won’t even be a rebuild. It’ll be a retool. By September, they’ll be contenders again.
If they miss the draft pick (which, of course, they will), it’s a retool right away. Just pull out this useless player and that total disappointment and replace them with hidden gems who’ve already been on a half-dozen other teams and never made a difference anywhere.
Referee Garrett Rank signals for an upcoming interference penalty on Tim Stützle (18) of the Ottawa Senators on Saturday.Troy Parla/Getty Images
Sure, they couldn’t handle the pressure in San Jose or Nashville, but in the gentle, supportive embrace of Toronto, they will finally blossom into the hall of famers they were meant to be. Do that four or six times and you’re pretty much guaranteed that next year is the year. It’s just a matter of finding the right third-line centre to unlock it all.
Or – and I’m just throwing this out there for discussion–- is it possible that the Leafs as you see them, and have been seeing them for some time, are the real Leafs? That maybe you don’t need to check the underlying numbers to figure out that when it chokes like a duck and folds like a duck, it’s a duck.
If that’s the case, draft or no draft, what we’re actually talking about here is running this lemon at max RPMs until the engine blows. You fire some people on top, you swap in some new bit players and you fly everyone out to Arizona to kiss the hem of Matthews’s bath robe while begging forgiveness. Then you show up on Day 1 of work pretending everything’s fine.
Put it this way – would it work at your job? Because their job is the same as yours. They just do it dressed funny.
If everyone you work with hates what they do, resents their colleagues, is mostly in it for a paycheque, and can’t be bothered to do decent work for the sake of pride, then things are not getting better. That’s when you either blow everything up or fold the business.
The Leafs are a special case in only one way – they don’t need to be good to make money. They don’t even need to care. They just need to say they’re good and that they care.
So if tanking is what gets everyone off their backs right now, they’ll tank. Whether or not it works, the tank will be a success. The first two-month tank in history. This club is always innovating.
By fall, they’ll be good again. Promise. Just don’t expect anything, and everything will always work out fine.