Toronto Maple Leafs new head coach Craig Berube runs his teams drills during training camp in Toronto on Sept. 19.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
During their annual ‘24 hours of doubt’ last summer, the Toronto Maple Leafs were briefly agents of change. Something fundamental was not working. Something new had to happen.
“There are times that you talk about patience,” team president Brendan Shanahan said at the club’s yearly wake. “However, when you see patterns persist, and results don’t change, you have to adjust the way you think about things.”
The hard part is admitting you have a problem. Having been brave and told their story, the Leafs declared themselves healed.
The roster that opens the new season on Wednesday hasn’t done much adjusting. A few new name plates, but same main guys, same approach, same goalie problem, same playoff questions.
The defence is bigger, but shakier on its pins. Given that no one aside from their moms believes in them any more, this version is probably more brittle than the previous one.
The major personnel change is a new head coach, Craig Berube. He has a reputation as a hard man. On the rare occasions when a smile creases his face, it looks like he’s ripping out stitches. Maybe he can intimidate the Leafs to competence.
If you offered them an eighth seed and told them the postseason starts tomorrow, do you think the Leafs would take it? Of course they would. It’s Toronto. Things can only get worse.
Only one thing has really changed from last year – the fanbase has accepted that the current Leafs generation is immutable. Toronto will ride this core until the wheels fall off.
This was settled last May, when the hunger for change reached hysterical levels. If the club had traded Mitch Marner and the team jet for a junior massage therapist and 23 bus passes, people would have celebrated.
Marner came to locker clearout day, said the players like being here because they are seen as “kind of gods” and the crisis was over.
There are cities in the world – strange places where the traffic flows and things get built and the teams win – where you can’t say this sort of thing after blowing it for the eighth year in a row. Where people would not just be affronted. Where they’d do something to demonstrate their unhappiness.
Maybe they’d cancel their season tickets. Maybe they’d go to the stadium and dig as many open graves as there are spots on the roster (that’s Hajduk, Croatia, where they tend to act out emotionally).
But they would do something, and management would feel the need to react.
Toronto did nothing. Took that ‘gods’ comment on board and kept on trucking. ‘I guess that means he’s not leaving, eh?’
So here you go. You didn’t want it, you got it.
There is something freeing about knowing the Leafs are struck in a permanent loop. Auston Matthews is on board for the next four years and can’t be traded. Same thing with William Nylander. Soon, Marner will be re-signed under even more generous terms. It is inevitable. John Tavares will be back, too, because the Leafs cannot bear the idea that a main character might escape their house of pain.
Sticking with those four guys means that there isn’t enough loose cash to sign another star. The Matthews/Nylander/Marner core guarantees the Leafs will never be bad enough to draft one either.
If the Leafs are going to dig up a hero, they will have to … this is impossible to write with a straight face … rely on their wits.
What are you up to for the next little while? Got any plans for May? I would not feel bad about booking something this far out.
This story has gotten so familiar that the local media no longer takes up an ambush position at the start of the season. That was over and done with around 2022, when the press accepted that no matter how much it gins up the viewing/listening/reading public, it will have no effect.
Now that the Oilers went from knocked out cold in November to 60 minutes from Disneyland, the Leafs don’t even have to bother trying until 2025. Winning in the regular season is just using up your luck before you really need it. Everyone knows that. Nowadays, losing is the new winning.
It’s not the Leafs can’t do anything wrong. It’s that they know they don’t need to get anything right.
When things go wrong, the people in suits who are entirely dependent on them for their jobs are the ones who pay, and even that doesn’t happen very often. The more faith that is shown in them, the less they feel the need to repay it.
If any of the big Leafs felt bad about this – about losing, about costing two head coaches, two GMs and about a million assistants their jobs, about making everyone inside the MLSE universe look useless – you would know that. Because when given the chance, they’d leave. That’s what people do in uncomfortable situations.
All of the Leafs stay. They lose and lose and lose and stay for about the same money they could make elsewhere. That’s because they know a lot of places, but this is the only one that they know to an absolute certainty will tolerate being disappointed again.
Great teams can be different, but epochally bad ones are the same. They are all terrified of change. They are prone to the sunk-cost fallacy. They fixate on statistics, rather than focusing on the evidence of their eyes. Everyone on top is overmanaging the meaningless and undermanaging the vital. The inmates aren’t just running the asylum, they’re setting their own annual budgets.
The beauty of being a Leafs fan in 2024 is that you know all of this. You go into this season, and the next one, and the one after, imbued with the sweet understanding that you are doomed. This is acceptance.
Your club won’t do anything to make itself better. So after nearly a decade, Toronto has begun to heal itself. We’ll check in on how the treatment’s going in April.