Toronto Maple Leaf Nazem Kadri tries to get the puck past Montreal Canadiens goalie Carey Price during first period action. The Toronto Maple Leafs opened their home season with a game against the Montreal Canadiens at the Air Canada Centre on Oct. 7 2015.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
It was the day before the season opener, and Joffrey Lupul was adamant that this team will be better.
Few are saying the same about the Toronto Maple Leafs right now. Even with coach Mike Babcock on board, few are giving them much of a chance of anything, other than another high draft pick.
But the players? They're optimists.
In a sense.
"I don't know if we can be much worse than we were at the end of last season," Lupul said.
Okay, so "better" for the Leafs is a low bar. They had only 68 points last season in a league in which 92 is now the average. They won only 11 of their last 51 games.
They couldn't score (24th in goals for) or defend (tied for 27th in goals against). They fired pretty much everyone: the coach, the general manager and almost all of the scouts. They dealt their best player (in Phil Kessel) – and one of their better defencemen (in Cody Franson) – for prospects.
Their average age is also more than 28 years in a league that's getting younger and quicker, as most of the talented kids were sent to the Toronto Marlies earlier this week.
And they had one of the worst preseason records in the NHL, losing five in a row heading into Wednesday's home opener against the Montreal Canadiens.
Where "better" is going to come from isn't obvious. But most believe the biggest push will be due to Babcock, whose work ethic and reputation have already instilled a curious new confidence in these players.
"On talent, they should be a bottom-three team," one rival executive in the Eastern Conference said recently of the Leafs. "Babs might get more out of them."
How he might do that is by introducing the style that worked wonders with the Detroit Red Wings the past 10 years. Even after they lost Nicklas Lidstrom on the back end and didn't have the most talent in the league, Babcock was able to coax extra points out of his roster by having them play an unrelenting, structured style that never gave up much defensively.
Under former coach Randy Carlyle, the Leafs were the second-weakest possession team in the NHL (43.8 per cent). Babcock's Detroit teams have always been a direct contrast to that – roughly 10 percentage points better – giving them an obvious territorial advantage.
It's a fair question how close Babcock can get to that ideal with such a mediocre roster. But there was certainly evidence it was beginning to work in preseason – despite Toronto's struggles to score – as they spent a lot less time in their end than was typical of previous Leafs teams.
They manage that, and they should hang in more games than a year ago.
"We're going to get so that we're organized," Babcock said. "We're going to be a hard group to play against and make it hard on teams. How long is that going to take? I don't know the answer to that question."
"We've put in a lot more work," Lupul explained. "I can see the way we play. I can see the way we practice is better. I can see our structure on the defensive side of things is better. We're going to have to find a way to score a couple more goals. We struggled to score last year, and we lost our most skilled player. So we're going to have to have a lot of guys step up to score goals, but we're going to play better.
"We're not going to lose games 6-1 and [blow out] games like that. We're going to be in games. We're going to be a hard-working team. And hopefully a fun team for everyone to watch."
The funny thing is that a lot of hockey fans in this city probably won't be watching at all. The combination of the Toronto Blue Jays' runaway success and ultralow expectations means the Leafs will start their season Wednesday with basically no fanfare.
The pressure simply won't be there. If they lose, it'll be as planned, and everyone in the hockey world will shrug.
And, make no mistake, they likely will lose, more often than not. What these Leafs don't look like, however, is the makings of an ugly tire fire, a repeat of the nightly disaster reel that last season turned into. They have a strong, no-nonsense coach, some strength in goal and a lot of capable veterans looking to reinvent themselves, which should prevent outright calamity.
On Tuesday, Toronto added to its blueline by taking advantage of the Vancouver Canucks' mistake and claimed 22-year-old defenceman Frank Corrado off waivers
Efficient mediocrity, without a lot of offence, is the prediction here, which keeps them in the NHL's bottom 10 and well away from an unlikely playoff push.
So, yes, the Leafs will be better. They shouldn't be a catastrophe. But they'll still be years from contention.
It's a start anyway.
Now back to baseball.