Why Maple Leafs shouldn’t be afraid to sell big before the trade deadline

TORONTO — Brian Burke has long been an advocate for the philosophy that based on current incentive structures, NHL teams should either be trying to get good or bad fast. Pick a direction.

Working with him here at Sportsnet, I came to agree with his theory that there’s nothing worse than the muddy middle, where the team has no actual shot to win the Cup, it needs some bounces to make the playoffs, it finishes middle, drafts middle, and gets some player who’s going to be a decent middle-six forward in, oh, maybe four years. 

Middling in, middling out, you stay in the middle. It’s not fun for the fans, it doesn’t sell tickets, and it’s a treadmill that’s tough to get off. The Minnesota Wild — the poster team for decades of mediocrity — got so sick of it that they paid Kirill Kaprizov a zillion dollars per year to help shove them off said treadmill, then sent a haul to the Vancouver Canucks for 1.5 years of Quinn Hughes.

And good on ’em.

I bring this up regarding the Toronto Maple Leafs, who are, for the first time in a decade, on the verge of getting on that treadmill. They’re 14^th in the East in a season in which, if you squint, you can convince yourself they’re probably better than that, but not by much. They’re extremely “mid,” and some might call that generous.

What we hear, now that they’re officially done-done — and they are done-done, with the volume of teams and points between them and a playoff spot becoming insurmountable — is that they’re willing to sell. 

But we’re also hearing they’re conducting a “retool.” They’re hoping to ramp it back up next season, with the hope-and-prayer plan being that next year they get:

• A healthy Chris Tanev

• A healthy, more effective Matthew Knies

• An NHL-ready Easton Cowan

• A rejuvenated Auston Matthews

• Better seasons from Dakota Joshua, Nicholas Roy, and on and on and on. Morgan Rielly probably falls in this category in their minds too, Brandon Carlo, others.

The plan, in many ways, sounds like, “Maybe the same guys will play better next year?”

Which should be scary for Leafs fans. 

The idea of extending pieces of this team — Bobby McMann and Scott Laughton — who are past their physical primes and are moving farther away from them, is hardly a plan at all. This is neither helping them get good or bad fast, it’s a path to getting back to the same place.

The Leafs need a sober look at where they stand. They’ve been one of the top dogs in the Atlantic for so long that as they’ve finally been passed, and the teams doing the passing aren’t exactly slowing down any time soon. Their years of draft picks are becoming realized, useful players.

The Montreal Canadiens are going to be a force for years to come with their young talent, the Detroit Red Wings are way better and buying, the Buffalo Sabres have taken that long-awaited step. The Leafs are chasing the Ottawa Senators in every conceivable statistical category that isn’t goaltending, and we haven’t mentioned the Florida teams yet, both of whom seem to have brighter immediate futures than Toronto. What Boston is, that I don’t exactly know, but overall, that’s not an encouraging divisional picture, is it? 

My point here is, if the Leafs head into this trade deadline, flip McMann for a pick and say, “We’ll be better next year,” they’re selling a fantasy.

Here’s the challenge, though: I think it’s legitimately hard to get the few great players they do have in Matthews, William Nylander and Knies, and I’ll even lump Cowan in there, who I think has a bright future in the league. Given their ages, and how hard it is to turn around a rebuild, I don’t actually think a full rebuild is in order here, at least not while they still have Matthews. 

But in a lot of ways, this team does in fact need a full-on defibrillator, and so they have to figure out how to plug that in. On the JD Bunkis show on Thursday, I said I’d look at most of the lineup like a bad batch of letters in Scrabble, where you willingly skip a turn to dump the letters into the bag and pick all new ones. The Leafs have to err on the side of overselling — being over-sellous, if you will — because it’s a lot more likely this is a bigger turnaround then they’re admitting to themselves, and this might be the quiet first step they have to take to something greater. 

I know that’s a huge ask for the general manager, but you can either take on the hard thing, or step quietly onto the zombie franchise treadmill.

If the Leafs are indeed able to turn it around next year, it’s going to take something so much more than “same guys play better.” It’s going to be because the haul of picks they bring back helped them land a great player or two in trades at the draft, and maybe they make a great UFA signing or two after moving on from a guy like Rielly.

Anyone whose name is even close to have been mentioned in the past few weeks should be available, even the guys they really like as players. I like Oliver Ekman-Larsson a lot, but he’s got meaningful value around the league on a great deal. Laughton is a great pro and player (even if they have never, for a day, given him a chance to prove that up the lineup), and a team would love to get their hands on him. Carlo, yep, McMann, sure, Simon Benoit, yes, and then you have to see which contracts you can move on from, whether it’s Max Domi’s, or Matias Maccelli’s, or yes, Rielly’s. 

You’re not going to be able to do everything, but you better start trying today, because you don’t have enough phones or hours on deadline day alone to make this greater fix happen. Throwing hands up and going, “Well, it was hard” isn’t going to cut it.

The Leafs are in a super-weird spot, and I think that includes GM Brad Treliving, who’s on the hot seat. He has to defend his role to his bosses regarding how they got here, while telling them he should be the one in charge of the steps I’ve mentioned. But I think it’s his best case at showing he’s out for the good of the franchise, not just hanging on for as many wins as possible to stay employed.

The Leafs can’t choose to win the draft lottery as the Islanders did last summer, but the Isles did more than that last season. They made a big trade, moving off Noah Dobson for the 16th and 17th picks in the draft, as well as Emil Heinemen. They’ve now got two kids on the way they’re really excited about, and it doesn’t even seem like they’re all that serious about trying to win the Cup this year. Playoffs are gravy. But they injected hope for the future when they traded for picks, and the fans — who had been watching an old and slow team for years — were excited to lean in to said hope. Yes, the Matthew Schaefer stuff took it to the next level, but there’s still lessons for the Leafs in there.

Fans are not too impatient to see the team aim at the future. They’re smart. They would be reinvigorated by a restocking of the cupboard that allowed them to at least be in on bidding wars when good players become available. And, ironically, as they aim to be good enough to keep Auston Matthews happy past this contract, your best bet is being able to show him that you have some future mapped out beyond “Hope everyone plays better next year.” 

I don’t know how big you’d wanna go in a real sell-off, but there are degrees of grandeur at their disposal. Some management types I’ve talked to have said they’d include Nylander in their considerations. But to me, I’ll say what I’ve said before there: you want to be the team looking at other teams’ great players and saying, “How do I get that guy” (as Vegas does so well), and not the team looking at your own great players and saying, “Let’s get rid of this guy.” 

So, at least look around. Is there a 1D out there who you’d covet enough to consider moving Nylander? You can’t say you’ve tried to solve the problems without considering everything.

The Leafs have almost no draft capital. They’re rolling out four of the same wingers in Domi, Robertson, Maccelli and Cowan, when they actually dress the latter at all. The D-corps badly needs some players who can make plays. 

They’re too far from good to claim they’re “playing better” from being better. They need to sell, yes, but they need to get over-sellous, or they risk mounting that treadmill of mediocrity, setting the run speed at “average,” and jogging off into an uninteresting oblivion.

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