I’m out…after 50 years of watching and being told that the Leafs have a plan I have reached one conclusion, the only plan they have is to take money from the fanbase and not deliver.
The sad thing is this has turned me off from Hockey in general. I am not looking for another team to cheer for, I am just not watching hockey.
External-Pace-1822
Leafs need to ask Matthews what he wants for his career legacy. If he’s going to leave in UFA they should try to move him now. If he wants to stay they can retool with him still as a contributing player and maybe be competitive in 3 or 4 years again.
billy_zef
This core has had more than enough chances to win; management failed them, starting with Dubas trading first-round picks every year and has not built a solid team to help the stars. Re-tool, rebuild… whatever you want to call it, needs to happen. I would ask Matthews if he is in for the long haul or not and start from there.
Evenspace-
They don’t need a full rebuild of their roster, they need a full rebuild of their culture. I still believe that Matthews comments at the end of last year really soured guys to his leadership.
I think a change at GM and coach is needed, but they need to go away from the well of the old boys club and bring in new minds.
I’m prepared to lose players I love for the sake of the team turning over a new leaf. (No pun intended)
Theycouldntpaymeenuf
Only two studs on the team
happysnack
Trading kadri, Sandin and not re signing Hyman were horrible moves. Fuck I hate being a fan of this team.
SadimHusum
We’re past the really hard part of the rebuild; we have two forwards at the top of the league in talent who are in their primes and a goalie tandem of a rookie and a 27 year old. That’s the shit teams bottom out for – you don’t sell Matthews and Nylander for picks when it’s statistically really unlikely anyone taken in the first round ever gets as good as they already are and will be for 4+ years
What needs to be done to the roster now is to acquire real depth and for our defence to get younger, both things that are partially solved via better coaching but also things that require clever gm work that I don’t trust Treliving to be capable of
I don’t actually think Tre’s terrible at his job, but he’s risk averse to a fault which is where the over-reliance on veterans comes from, paired with ownership pressure to stay competitive pushing him toward moves that can only maintain the status quo at the cost of the future. He did a solid job in Calgary until their two best players left and Edwards demanded they stay a playoff team in the wake of Gaudreau leaving for nothing (somewhat deceptively, he made it sound like Calgary was a real UFA option) and Tkachuk guaranteeing he’d leave so please trade him. Tkachuk for Huberdeau and Weegar was a great trade and we’re pretending that anyone could have accounted for Hubie turning into a 3rd liner after a 115 point season and hovering in the 80’s on average before it
The wheels fell off when the carriage turned into a pumpkin and all the talent wanted out, but in the timeframe he allegedly “ruined” Calgary, they had a defence of Tanev, Weegar, Hanafin, Anderson, and Zadorov, Markstrom in net with Wolf in the pipeline, Tkachuk and Gaudreau replaced 1:1 with Huberdeau and Kadri on a roster that was already playoff capable. That’s objectively a well constructed team barring a historic, immediate falloff of the most important forward on your roster
But what Toronto needs is coaching and management with the balls to give guys like Webber, Danford, Mermis, and Quillan some run to see who breaks out and who gains enough value to be packaged into trades for impact players we aren’t just renting, and the creativity to utilize these players in ways to maximize their development and potential trade value. Look what Cooper has done with Holmberg and how Sandin grew into his role in Washington. Hell, Robertson’s health and deployment finally overlapped enough to make it clear he’s not an AHL player. Both Dubas and Treliving undervalued this kind of player and ripped away any hope of continuity and higher development to trade them for veterans with a higher floor but a ceiling well established to be pretty low – there was zero reason Sandin needed to go so Gustafson could be on the roster for 2 months. Tanev, Carlo, McCabe, Rielly, and Stetcher is *serviceable* while people develop and assets are recouped across a couple years, utilizing a scheme and breakout that’s actually compatible with NHL hockey
Chief desperately needs to go, and Treliving probably does too as the teams needs creativity and that’s his biggest weakness as a gm. The team proved earlier this month they’re way better than their record with different coaching that better fits their strengths, the regression from emphasized possession, short passes, controlled skating back to turtling for entire periods at a time, dumping with zero intent to chase, terrible stretch passes through the neutral zone, and meat shield defence that prioritizes blocking shots while a team effortlessly establishes their cycle just tells me that Savard was fired with a warning to Berube and he’s gotten comfortable again for some reason. This is already a playoff team with adequate coaching, the underlying numbers last year were terrible too but Stolarz being #1 and Woll being #6 in save% last year masked the fact that Berube’s north/south doesn’t work with this team at all
tl;dr is keep 34 (29), 88 (30), Knies (23), and Roy (29), sell OEL and McMann at possible all-time highs, Robertson for anything, let Maccelli walk if you can’t trade him without retention as 3m AAV is worth more than any return he’d yield, then stop playing guys like Jarnkrok and Myers who are known commodities and trust in the prospects to develop with a good eye to discern who is fodder and who will step into the 30+ year old shoes. I’m also a proponent of selling Stolarz as soon as he shows any degree of value as the odd goalie out due to his age and more severe injury history than Woll, there are teams who think they’re a goalie away from winning it all who can be desperate enough to overpay, even if that means two 2nds instead of one
Itwasuntilitwasnt
No take it down to the slab.
Mathews
Nylander
Reilly
Travaras
Bring in NHL ready prospects, draft picks . Should be a deep draft. We need hockey players that play for a cup not for themselves and not for money. Before any of these players got payed they played hockey. Now they are just a bunch of beibers
If they could’ve only played with the heart of the jays.
McJoe77
They can’t really do a full rebuild. Tre has set it up to make it extremely difficult to do so. Matthews, Nylander, Tavares, Rielly, and Tanev all have no move clauses. I feel like there’s maybe a small chance Matthews realizes he wants to play in the States and doesn’t want this Leaf team to be his legacy, even though he’s the captain and the all time leading scorer, but I doubt you get the other 4 to waive. JT isnt going anywhere and there’s no indication that Rielly wants to leave either. Tanev you probably couldn’t trade if you wanted to or if he wanted you to, but you wait that one out anyway.
McCabe has a full no trade too, and his contract is in year 1. Then on top of that Domi, Joshua, Jarnkrok, OEL, Carlo, and Stolarz all have limited no trade clauses which obviously limit your options. I’m sure they could trade OEL and Carlo somewhere, but I’m not sure there’s a match of a team that wants to take Domi and isn’t on his trade list. Same with Stolarz. And you’re probably stuck with Joshua.
And before you say, you just tell them to fuck off and waive or you’ll bench them, that’s not how anything works. There’s a reason you’ve never seen a team do that, because who’s signing with the GM who benched his star players until they waived their trade protection? The only other time I can think of where that worked was the Rangers and that team has now fully fallen apart.
And outside of the guys I’ve already mentioned, what are you tearing down “to the studs” by trading away Maccelli, Roy, Robertson, Laughton, Lorentz, Benoit, and Stecher? You still have all the same guys. You didn’t change anything.
I still think there’s a way to do this without totally blowing it up. Plus, this team has never had a player as good as Matthews. I would hate for this era of the Leafs to end like this. Trading some players that are over performing right now and acquiring some players that are underperforming that you can get more out of is a real option that they need to explore. Bobby McMann will never be better than he is right now. He’s turning 30, he’s going to score 25 ish goals and he’s making 1.35 right now. He’s going to want to cash in and he’s going to need to do that somewhere else, you can probably easily get at least what Vancouver got for Sherwood. OEL is another guy having almost a career season at 34 with 2 more years left on his contract as our 3rd pair left shot D in an ideal lineup. I think you can easily get a 2nd+ for him as well. Scott Laughton seems like he wants to be here, but he’s a 4C, does having him and Roy for 6+ million next season make any sense at all? Guys like him ALWAYS get traded at the deadline for more than their worth. There’s a world where they move those 3 guys, they see what they have in Thrun and Rifai and whoever else, and maybe they bring in a guy like Ryan Strome who the Ducks are trying to get rid who you can squeeze some value out of as a playmaker in your top 6. Or Warren Foegele who has another year at 3.5 but the Kings just scratched him.
They CAN fix this. Treliving and Berube can’t. Treliving and Berube need to be gone ASAP, make Pridham the interim GM and hire Bruce Boudreau to finish out the season behind the bench. Boudreau is in his 70s but it’s a job he’s always wanted and he’s always had regular season success. Give him the rest of the season, finish 10th in the East like all the mid 00s Leafs teams used to do, and reload with your 5 extra 2nd round pick level assets you got above.
AlanInVancouverBC
I would keep Goalies: Wool, Hildeby, Defence: Tanev, McCabe, Ekman-Larsson, possibly Stecher, Forwards: Centres: Laughton, Matthews, Tavares, Roy, Right Wing: Cowan, Nyander, Left Wing: Knies.
The rest can be traded. (Reilly, Domi, Robertson, Benoit, Carlo, Jarnkrok, Lorentz, Maccelli, and McMann) There’s room for 2 defencemen, 2 right wingers, and 3 left wingers.
14 Comments
I am adamant they don’t need a rebuild. The have a ton of scoring talent. What they need is a 180 on the philosophy of the gm and coach.
Long overdue..
Even with the failure core , all they got to show for is a fluke 2nd round playoffs choke
Blow it up
https://i.redd.it/ty14nna07igg1.gif
I’m out…after 50 years of watching and being told that the Leafs have a plan I have reached one conclusion, the only plan they have is to take money from the fanbase and not deliver.
The sad thing is this has turned me off from Hockey in general. I am not looking for another team to cheer for, I am just not watching hockey.
Leafs need to ask Matthews what he wants for his career legacy. If he’s going to leave in UFA they should try to move him now. If he wants to stay they can retool with him still as a contributing player and maybe be competitive in 3 or 4 years again.
This core has had more than enough chances to win; management failed them, starting with Dubas trading first-round picks every year and has not built a solid team to help the stars. Re-tool, rebuild… whatever you want to call it, needs to happen. I would ask Matthews if he is in for the long haul or not and start from there.
They don’t need a full rebuild of their roster, they need a full rebuild of their culture. I still believe that Matthews comments at the end of last year really soured guys to his leadership.
I think a change at GM and coach is needed, but they need to go away from the well of the old boys club and bring in new minds.
I’m prepared to lose players I love for the sake of the team turning over a new leaf. (No pun intended)
Only two studs on the team
Trading kadri, Sandin and not re signing Hyman were horrible moves. Fuck I hate being a fan of this team.
We’re past the really hard part of the rebuild; we have two forwards at the top of the league in talent who are in their primes and a goalie tandem of a rookie and a 27 year old. That’s the shit teams bottom out for – you don’t sell Matthews and Nylander for picks when it’s statistically really unlikely anyone taken in the first round ever gets as good as they already are and will be for 4+ years
What needs to be done to the roster now is to acquire real depth and for our defence to get younger, both things that are partially solved via better coaching but also things that require clever gm work that I don’t trust Treliving to be capable of
I don’t actually think Tre’s terrible at his job, but he’s risk averse to a fault which is where the over-reliance on veterans comes from, paired with ownership pressure to stay competitive pushing him toward moves that can only maintain the status quo at the cost of the future. He did a solid job in Calgary until their two best players left and Edwards demanded they stay a playoff team in the wake of Gaudreau leaving for nothing (somewhat deceptively, he made it sound like Calgary was a real UFA option) and Tkachuk guaranteeing he’d leave so please trade him. Tkachuk for Huberdeau and Weegar was a great trade and we’re pretending that anyone could have accounted for Hubie turning into a 3rd liner after a 115 point season and hovering in the 80’s on average before it
The wheels fell off when the carriage turned into a pumpkin and all the talent wanted out, but in the timeframe he allegedly “ruined” Calgary, they had a defence of Tanev, Weegar, Hanafin, Anderson, and Zadorov, Markstrom in net with Wolf in the pipeline, Tkachuk and Gaudreau replaced 1:1 with Huberdeau and Kadri on a roster that was already playoff capable. That’s objectively a well constructed team barring a historic, immediate falloff of the most important forward on your roster
But what Toronto needs is coaching and management with the balls to give guys like Webber, Danford, Mermis, and Quillan some run to see who breaks out and who gains enough value to be packaged into trades for impact players we aren’t just renting, and the creativity to utilize these players in ways to maximize their development and potential trade value. Look what Cooper has done with Holmberg and how Sandin grew into his role in Washington. Hell, Robertson’s health and deployment finally overlapped enough to make it clear he’s not an AHL player. Both Dubas and Treliving undervalued this kind of player and ripped away any hope of continuity and higher development to trade them for veterans with a higher floor but a ceiling well established to be pretty low – there was zero reason Sandin needed to go so Gustafson could be on the roster for 2 months. Tanev, Carlo, McCabe, Rielly, and Stetcher is *serviceable* while people develop and assets are recouped across a couple years, utilizing a scheme and breakout that’s actually compatible with NHL hockey
Chief desperately needs to go, and Treliving probably does too as the teams needs creativity and that’s his biggest weakness as a gm. The team proved earlier this month they’re way better than their record with different coaching that better fits their strengths, the regression from emphasized possession, short passes, controlled skating back to turtling for entire periods at a time, dumping with zero intent to chase, terrible stretch passes through the neutral zone, and meat shield defence that prioritizes blocking shots while a team effortlessly establishes their cycle just tells me that Savard was fired with a warning to Berube and he’s gotten comfortable again for some reason. This is already a playoff team with adequate coaching, the underlying numbers last year were terrible too but Stolarz being #1 and Woll being #6 in save% last year masked the fact that Berube’s north/south doesn’t work with this team at all
tl;dr is keep 34 (29), 88 (30), Knies (23), and Roy (29), sell OEL and McMann at possible all-time highs, Robertson for anything, let Maccelli walk if you can’t trade him without retention as 3m AAV is worth more than any return he’d yield, then stop playing guys like Jarnkrok and Myers who are known commodities and trust in the prospects to develop with a good eye to discern who is fodder and who will step into the 30+ year old shoes. I’m also a proponent of selling Stolarz as soon as he shows any degree of value as the odd goalie out due to his age and more severe injury history than Woll, there are teams who think they’re a goalie away from winning it all who can be desperate enough to overpay, even if that means two 2nds instead of one
No take it down to the slab.
Mathews
Nylander
Reilly
Travaras
Bring in NHL ready prospects, draft picks . Should be a deep draft. We need hockey players that play for a cup not for themselves and not for money. Before any of these players got payed they played hockey. Now they are just a bunch of beibers
If they could’ve only played with the heart of the jays.
They can’t really do a full rebuild. Tre has set it up to make it extremely difficult to do so. Matthews, Nylander, Tavares, Rielly, and Tanev all have no move clauses. I feel like there’s maybe a small chance Matthews realizes he wants to play in the States and doesn’t want this Leaf team to be his legacy, even though he’s the captain and the all time leading scorer, but I doubt you get the other 4 to waive. JT isnt going anywhere and there’s no indication that Rielly wants to leave either. Tanev you probably couldn’t trade if you wanted to or if he wanted you to, but you wait that one out anyway.
McCabe has a full no trade too, and his contract is in year 1. Then on top of that Domi, Joshua, Jarnkrok, OEL, Carlo, and Stolarz all have limited no trade clauses which obviously limit your options. I’m sure they could trade OEL and Carlo somewhere, but I’m not sure there’s a match of a team that wants to take Domi and isn’t on his trade list. Same with Stolarz. And you’re probably stuck with Joshua.
And before you say, you just tell them to fuck off and waive or you’ll bench them, that’s not how anything works. There’s a reason you’ve never seen a team do that, because who’s signing with the GM who benched his star players until they waived their trade protection? The only other time I can think of where that worked was the Rangers and that team has now fully fallen apart.
And outside of the guys I’ve already mentioned, what are you tearing down “to the studs” by trading away Maccelli, Roy, Robertson, Laughton, Lorentz, Benoit, and Stecher? You still have all the same guys. You didn’t change anything.
I still think there’s a way to do this without totally blowing it up. Plus, this team has never had a player as good as Matthews. I would hate for this era of the Leafs to end like this. Trading some players that are over performing right now and acquiring some players that are underperforming that you can get more out of is a real option that they need to explore. Bobby McMann will never be better than he is right now. He’s turning 30, he’s going to score 25 ish goals and he’s making 1.35 right now. He’s going to want to cash in and he’s going to need to do that somewhere else, you can probably easily get at least what Vancouver got for Sherwood. OEL is another guy having almost a career season at 34 with 2 more years left on his contract as our 3rd pair left shot D in an ideal lineup. I think you can easily get a 2nd+ for him as well. Scott Laughton seems like he wants to be here, but he’s a 4C, does having him and Roy for 6+ million next season make any sense at all? Guys like him ALWAYS get traded at the deadline for more than their worth. There’s a world where they move those 3 guys, they see what they have in Thrun and Rifai and whoever else, and maybe they bring in a guy like Ryan Strome who the Ducks are trying to get rid who you can squeeze some value out of as a playmaker in your top 6. Or Warren Foegele who has another year at 3.5 but the Kings just scratched him.
They CAN fix this. Treliving and Berube can’t. Treliving and Berube need to be gone ASAP, make Pridham the interim GM and hire Bruce Boudreau to finish out the season behind the bench. Boudreau is in his 70s but it’s a job he’s always wanted and he’s always had regular season success. Give him the rest of the season, finish 10th in the East like all the mid 00s Leafs teams used to do, and reload with your 5 extra 2nd round pick level assets you got above.
I would keep Goalies: Wool, Hildeby, Defence: Tanev, McCabe, Ekman-Larsson, possibly Stecher, Forwards: Centres: Laughton, Matthews, Tavares, Roy, Right Wing: Cowan, Nyander, Left Wing: Knies.
The rest can be traded. (Reilly, Domi, Robertson, Benoit, Carlo, Jarnkrok, Lorentz, Maccelli, and McMann) There’s room for 2 defencemen, 2 right wingers, and 3 left wingers.
I didn’t put a lot of thought in this.