What exactly is wrong with the Maple Leafs

The Toronto Maple Leafs are not this bad.

Now, they’re not good right now either, but the true talent of the group is much better than their play to date. I’ve heard and seen the chatter about the potential for them to miss playoffs, and certainly with this start and some bad injury luck, that outcome is not out of the question. But if they missed, they’d be among the more talented groups to do so in the past decade.

After giving up 15 goals over their past three games, and in the aftermath of a flood of articles about their shortcomings — a wave which I contributed to — it’s time to assess which problems are legitimate.

This exercise is necessary for fans, as the opposite of the expression “winning cures everything” also holds true. A lot of blame gets tossed about when you lose, and it’s not generally done very methodically. It’s mostly just noise before a sham trial concludes that, yes, Derek Lalonde has ruined the Leafs (or whatever).

The first-year assistant coach has not ruined the Leafs. No single thing has, and the idea that they’re “ruined” is no sure thing, either. A bold implication, I know.

So, let’s pick up some of the accusations and place them under the microscope.

In fact, let’s start with the one I just mentioned that I’ve seen on Twitter a few times:

Changes that were made by the incoming Lalonde are responsible for their porous defensive play so far

Doing video work is hard, and harder when you don’t have the tech to look at systems play easily. Hockey is sloppy, and so you rarely get clean positional play to evaluate in a game — maybe just a few times each night. I note that, because I did video work in the AHL for a couple years, see this stuff well, and to my eye I just don’t think the Leafs are trying anything different than last year, systems-wise. I think they’re doing a far worse job of what they’re trying to do, though. Claiming something different without being able to point to the specific change they’ve made is grasping at straws.

And so, the idea that it’s on Lalonde is a strange one. An assistant coach would never get to come in and dictate something as massive as the team’s defensive structure to the head coach. Hell, that’s half of the job of the head coach, implementing what he believes is the best plan.

If Lalonde had stepped in and said “OK, scrap the 1-2-2 forecheck and scrap the hybrid D-zone coverage of yore, we’re doing (X) now,” and it looked this bad, it would be entirely incumbent on the head coach to step in and say “OK, yeah that’s over, we’re going back to the better way.”

The buck always stops at the top, no matter which assistant has been delegated which area of specialization. (And to the point of many, Mike Van Ryn spends more time with the D-men anyway.)

Verdict on blaming new assistant: Not guilty

The Leafs’ desire to become more Florida-like has led to a talent drain

The Leafs lost Mitch Marner, and that hurts. You can quibble with the details of how that went down, but that’s a big hole to fill.

With Marner, the Leafs of old very much prioritized skill and playmaking, to the point of much derision. They had Rasmus Sandin and Timothy Liljegren and Connor Timmins on the back end — guys who struggled in the playoffs too — but they could at least move the puck up the rink. So could Justin Holl and TJ Brodie (until his last year), but none of those guys were deemed tough enough. They made fans crazy, but as I regularly pointed out, they did a good job at getting the puck going back the right way.

Their fourth line often had guys like Jason Spezza, Joe Thornton or Wayne Simmonds, which wasn’t a great fit, but again, those guys could make plays. Same goes for depth guys like Alex Kerfoot or Ilya Mikheyev or Ondrej Kase. The Leafs would love ol’ ‘Flex Seal’ — Keffoot — as we call him on our show on their third line.

And so, it looks like this:

The Leafs certainly could have success doing it differently, and they beat Florida three times in Round 2 of the playoffs last season by limiting Grade A’s, getting solid goaltending, and finishing well. But there’s a level of chasing the game where you just can’t win, and the Leafs are fully there now.

Do they need to play more to Berube’s simple, straight-lines style? Does he need to allow his guys to make more plays? Do they need to make personnel changes?

Whatever they do, they just can’t keep doing this, where this seems to be prioritizing grit over ability. It’s funny, they were probably ahead of the curve, too far ahead in fact, when it came to needing more skill guys. And as the league gets faster, their decision to consciously go the other way doesn’t look great.

Verdict on talent drain: Guilty

The goaltending is letting them down

There’s no doubt Anthony Stolarz is off to a bad start this season. At the same time, he was dealt some brutal cards to play out of the gates, with his tandem partner on a leave of absence, and the team has been sloppier in front of him than it has ever been in the Auston Matthews era. Surely it’s been exhausting, and now after two straight pulls, it sounds like he’s got some nagging injury.

Trying to chalk up his poor play to “he once he criticized his teammates” about a month ago also is grasping at straws. Maybe it didn’t help, but as causes go, the truth is it’s just been a brutal environment for a goalie.

Joseph Woll figures to be back on the weekend, but he’s missed training camp and six weeks of the season, so expectations should be low.

There’s not much to do there, but wait and hope they start to get something close to what they got in the crease last year.

Verdict: Guilty

They don’t have enough pushback

There is great irony in this one, given the team seems to have sacrificed its more talented players for more of this, only … they’re no better in this department. Yes, maybe they’re more physically capable of doing it considering they’re the biggest team in the league by raw dimensions, but they don’t have the guys who want to do it.

When Scott Laughton got drilled by the giant Nikita Zadorov, the Leafs got their best response of the year, with Bobby McMann going after the big man. It seemed like Zadorov might be a guy the Leafs would want to set a tone with early the next game, to let the Bruins know they came to play.

A few minutes into the game, the bruising Bruins D-man took a similar run at Nick Robertson, and the Leafs most fight-likely D-man Simon Benoit … skated right on by like nothing happened, at least as we could see in the video. The play sure didn’t stop.

And even though the hit itself was fine, it’s a tone thing. Zadorov crushed Robertson later in the period too, and not much came of it then either. So when it came time to put a lick on Matthews in the numbers, why not right? Nobody’s gonna do anything anyway.

And y’know what? Nobody did anything, because by and large, the Leafs are big, but they don’t want to play that game. Dakota Joshua doesn’t, Nick Roy doesn’t, even Bobby McMann doesn’t really. Matthew Knies doesn’t, obviously Matthews doesn’t … like they’re huge, but they aren’t those guys. The back end is the same, Philippe Myers, Chris Tanev, Brandon Carlo … all big, but not exactly physical.

Max Domi may have recognized that the Matthews thing wasn’t a great look, but his delayed reaction attempt on Zadorov just led to a penalty and the icing of the game as the Bruins would get their fifth goal on that very power play.

The Leafs don’t have to fight. But they don’t seem to take anything anyone does to them personally, save for Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Jake McCabe. They definitely lack that attitude.

Now is it why they don’t win? I don’t think so, not really. They’ve never been that team, and they’ve won a pile of hockey games the past five-plus years. But if you’re not going to be skilled, it would be nice if they were something else.

Verdict: Guilty

Auston Matthews isn’t a good enough captain

Just a short note on this one: I don’t think we can know what kind of captain Matthews is, though we can roughly speculate. But when he got the ‘C’, I think the idea was that he’s the face of the franchise, and as he goes, they go. He’s the leader, like it or not. And with that, if he were having a Hart Trophy-contending season, or another Selke Trophy-contending season, you wouldn’t need to look to anything else he does for inspiration.

But as I wrote Monday, the guy is obviously in real decline here, and nobody’s sure why. As I noted in that piece earlier this week, it isn’t the absence of Marner, as Matthews has thrived without him in the past, actually scoring more when Marner wasn’t on his line than than when he was.

Here’s a table from Natural Stat Trick, numbers all at 5-on-5.

Just look at the ratio of giveaways and takeaways compared to a few seasons ago. Hits taken just shows how little he’s in the battles compared to usual.

So all this stuff about “is he a good enough captain,” I barely think it matters. What they need is for him to be a superstar. And so far this year, he’s been … good? His line outscores whoever they play against, and he was on pace for 40-something goals. He’s been just good, rather than supernova.

The rest of the game isn’t there, and until it is, it doesn’t matter if he’s David Goggins or whatever motivational speaker you want him to be. It won’t matter.

Verdict: Not Guilty

Overall, the Leafs still have so much talent that they should figure it out. They can score, their goalies should be better, this D-core has a history of being way better. They should be able to find it. But nothing is promised, and some of the problems right now are very real. We’ll see how desperate things get in the weeks to come, as their schedule slowly turns from easy to much harder.

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