Over the Toronto Maple Leafs‘ Core Four era and into whatever this season could be called, few people questioned if they had enough talent to win. To be clear, that doesn’t mean nobody questioned if they would win — plenty of people did that. It’s just nobody questioned if they had enough talent to win — there is a difference.
Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander and John Tavares have plenty of skill. But as we know, success isn’t built on talent alone.
I have often heard that nobody gets to the NHL who hasn’t put in the work, and I agree that you just can’t do it without enough raw hours in the lab. It’s a lifelong commitment, starting with the professionalization of your schedule from a young age. But from my years climbing to NHL camps and on AHL coaching staffs, and starting from my childhood in NHL dressing rooms, I know it’s not all “blood, sweat and tears” for every guy who makes it. I’ve seen that it’s just flat-out easier for some.
If every player was gifted various levels of attribute points on the video game-style slider bars of ability, not every player with maxed-out “vision” and “hands” and “skating” also got “competitiveness” pushed to the same point.
The Leafs’ Core Four certainly put in years of work and are beyond elite at their craft, but at times you wonder if they weren’t hurt by the fact that they were so good at every level they played along the way. They were just so elite at such a young age that they showed up in the league on magazine covers as franchise saviours, then were handed ownership of the team and told to just keep being awesome on their way to their next inevitable success.
Tavares was given exceptional status into the OHL before he turned 15. Matthews was another first-overall NHL selection, a huge goal-scoring phenom. Nylander might be more purely talented than even the two guys I just named, and went eighth overall. Marner wasn’t exactly under-skilled at fourth overall himself.
But in the NHL, it didn’t “just happen.” A post-season loss to Columbus did, though, along with a defeat to a far less talented Montreal team. What happened was failure and adversity, and it didn’t seem like the group had a wealth of experiences to draw on during those outcomes.
The lessons were hard, and later they had some tough draws in opponents that would go on to win Cups (and some poorly timed injuries). But the exposure of their lack of grit and resilience led to management desperately trying to help fill in for their perceived shortcomings.
I can’t help but wonder if their incredible skill and success on the way up insulated them from having to learn to scrap back. Maybe they just weren’t wired that way and never will be, maybe they hadn’t built the calluses yet. But for years, management tried to tape those attributes to the outside of the core of their team, hoping it could make up for the lack of desperate pushes from their stars.
As it turned out, no amount of Ilya Lybushkins or even Jake Muzzins on D could get them past the second round. Ryan O’Reilly probably moved the needle the most of any addition, but it still left plain that if the guys who play the most for you and in the biggest spots aren’t full of fire — aren’t dawgs — it doesn’t really matter.
I’m a big believer that you have to acquire talent first to win in the NHL, but competitiveness has to be that next layer — and the Leafs just haven’t had it.
Now, I do believe that the years of experience and the lessons taught can be transformational, and that these guys — yes, even with Marner gone — should all understand by now how hard it is in the highest leverage spots, and that they can win. After all, we’re told many guys “can’t win” until they do, so I’m not writing that possibility off.
I also think that the Leafs have a couple players becoming important like Matthew Knies and Easton Cowan, who have a bit more of those sought-after competitive instincts.
With that in mind, Cowan in particular is the perfect jumping-off point for part two here, because he really does have that edge to his game.
For many, the general problem with the team was a talented core that hadn’t found the necessary level of competitiveness. That was misconstrued as a lack of size and toughness.
Enough people talked about the team’s shortcomings as a size issue that when Brad Treliving took over as GM, he set out to change the perception of the Leafs. He got the huge Dakota Joshua, the very large Nicolas Roy, and Philippe Myers takes a regular shift, and on and on. Suddenly, the Leafs were the league’s very biggest, heaviest team. Last I checked, they were still the heaviest at about 207 pounds per player, on average.
But we’ve all seen how they look this year, we all saw the aftermath of the Matthews knee injury. We know this isn’t a tough team that likes confrontation, they just happen to be big.
The following can’t be understated: it’s crazy how the Leafs have had some of the biggest guys in the league, who also happen to be the guys who like the rough stuff the very least. The list is long. There’s perhaps no better example of this than fourth-liner Steven Lorentz, who is six-foot-four and 220 pounds, and has 12 penalty minutes in 60 games this season. He seems like a super nice guy, one of the best really. Myers is six-foot-five and 220 pounds, with no major penalties in 34 games this season.
I’m not even talking about just fighting here, I’m talking about a lack of raw competitiveness. Leon Draisaitl won’t fight, but he’ll just about chop Alex Pietrangelo in two for having the audacity to challenge him. Evgeni Malkin doesn’t fight but nobody wants to go within six feet of him when he’s angry because he will hurt you by whatever means is most convenient to him, legal or otherwise.
They have that coveted “eff you,” while for years here the opposite has been true of the Leafs’ biggest men. Go down the list: Justin Holl (six-foot-four), Frederik Gauthier (six-foot-five), Nick Ritchie (six-foot-three), Martin Marincin (six-foot-four), or a dozen other names.
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I look around the league, and I see a guy like Brandon Hagel, whose raw attributes may not be the league’s best, but he has just an insane amount of drive and passion for the game. I saw a much smaller guy in Conor Garland get a long-term contract based in no small part on his will and daily engagement. Hell, I’ve watched a hall-of-fame career from Brad Marchand built largely on the back of the do-whatever-it-takes-ness he brings to every game.
And if you want to go to the bigger names, I see the relentless drive of Nathan MacKinnon and Connor McDavid, superstars whose level of passion matches their ability.
I started by talking about the core’s lack of experience in battling through the hard spots, which to me is a competitiveness thing. It’s not just going to be given in the NHL, you have to earn it.
We just talked about some players being big but not going directly at the other team — that’s under the umbrella of competitiveness, too.
They badly need scrappiness, investment, and engagement. (There’s a reason fans loved Wendel and Dougie and Tie.)
When the Leafs were finally too far out of range to make a serious playoff run, they started calling up a few AHL hopefuls, players who are invested and desperate to make an impression at the next level. Michael Pezzetta fought one second into his first Leafs game, Bo Groulx has scored like a proven vet, and Jacob Quillan is already one of their best skating forecheckers. It has badly hurt the team’s chances of tanking into the bottom five, because they’ve brought life and spirit to the game.
What a concept.
For coach Craig Berube, the frustration with this lack of passion has been palpable. He’s recently said he’s been asking for it all season long, only for it to recently show up with AHL call-ups and some post-Matthews-injury guilt.
How it’s looked in those moments has only exposed its absence earlier in the season.
For next season, the guilt will not be there to spur the team along each day. They’ll need a reinvigorated core (which has learned from the past), and an injection of daily competitiveness.
You can go ’round in circles talking about the best ways to build a team, but if your guys aren’t intrinsically motivated to compete, you won’t win. The Leafs are saying the post-season “autopsy” won’t be completed just yet, and that they will have a plan.
But a lack of competitiveness — not size — is certainly a part of what’s killing them. The way back to life includes finding a few players who play with some, before the team pulls the plug on what’s left of this core for good.
