Before he took questions at the Maple Leafs’ season-ending media availability, team president Brendan Shanahan went out of his way to deliver a message to the team’s beleaguered fan base.
“We really wanted to be a beacon of happiness for you,” he said, citing the challenges of the past year due to the pandemic. “So starting with me and Kyle Dubas, our management staff, our coaching staff and all our players, we take responsibility for disappointing you and letting you down and not getting the job done.”
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Shanahan knew that words wouldn’t mean much after the way the Leafs season unraveled against Montreal.
It’s action that matters, he said, in the coming offseason and the season that follows.
Still, he added: “As horrible and as devastated as we feel today that we’ve let people down, we are not going to stop until we accomplish this. We are going to do this here in Toronto with this group. There will be changes that will be made. There will be tweaks along the way, of course. The team will evolve. The people will evolve. But we are going to get this done. And we’re not going to focus on the reasons why it can’t happen.
“We’re going to focus on the ways that it can happen.”
Here’s what else you need to know management said about the state of the team on Wednesday.
The Core Four are staying
There wasn’t much gray here.
While they plan to take the coming weeks to assess what exactly went so wrong, Shanahan and Dubas both made it abundantly clear they intend to keep their four highly paid players together: Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, John Tavares, and William Nylander.
Despite the result this season, the Leafs aren’t giving up on the idea a winner can be built with four players eating up around half of the salary cap.
“I’ll say this about our top four,” Shanahan said, “I think any team in the league would love to have any one of them. But we want them. We like them. We want to keep them here. They’re special players. They’re all deeply, deeply committed to winning here in Toronto, and it’s important for us as a management group to continue to develop them.”
By which, he meant developing them to better perform in situations like Game 7 the other night against Montreal “and surround them with other players that can help them in that development as well.”
Dubas cited the Pittsburgh Penguins with four players — albeit not all forwards — eating up a similar percentage of the cap when they won some of their championships.
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“I just really believe in all four of them as people,” the Leafs general manager said.
Only Nylander, drafted in 2014, became a Leaf before Dubas, who joined the organization later that summer. (Shanahan had recently taken over as president.) Dubas led the signing of Tavares in free agency in 2018 and memorably signed Matthews, Marner and Nylander to their second NHL contracts.
In other words, he’s invested greatly in all of them.
“The reality is that three of the four are still very young in their career,” Dubas said, referring to Matthews, Marner and Nylander, who are all 25 and under. “I have a deep belief in them. Certainly their talent, which I think everybody sees and knows, but also in them as people, in particular how much playing here means to them and (what) winning here would mean to them.”
“Those are very unique players and hard players to get,” Shanahan added. “You just can’t quit on these guys. You just can’t quit on players that care so much — and they do.”
The challenge remains how to find enough talent around them without much coin to spare.
Unprompted, Shanahan brought up the salary cap and how it was expected to rise 4 to 6 percent annually before the pandemic struck and that it would have gone up again for next season.
The Leafs weren’t expecting an $81.5 million cap for years. How could they have? Despite that, the Leafs won’t be changing their plan.
It’s an approach that leaves little room for error.
It means nailing free agency with limited resources — more of the same $700,000-$1.5 million contracts the Leafs gave to Jason Spezza, Joe Thornton, Jimmy Vesey and Wayne Simmonds last offseason.
More of those buys need to hit, as do any acquisitions at the trade deadline. In the end, not enough of them did when it really mattered this season.
“I don’t think that our depth was an issue,” Shanahan said. “I thought that our depth actually played really well all season long, and I thought that our depth was a benefit to us in the playoffs.”
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It’s a tough case to make.
Over seven games against Montreal in the playoffs, the Leafs got a combined one goal from the group of Thornton, Simmonds, Nick Foligno, Pierre Engvall, Ilya Mikheyev, Adam Brooks and Riley Nash.
Alex Galchenyuk scored once.
Zach Hyman isn’t depth, but he managed just one goal and no assists in his return from a sprained MCL.
“The production, not just for our top players, but not just even them but all through our lineup, save for a few guys, was lacking,” Sheldon Keefe said. “And that’s an area that stands out to me.”
Player | GP | Goals | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
7 | 5 | 8 | |
7 | 1 | 6 | |
7 | 3 | 5 | |
7 | 1 | 5 | |
7 | 0 | 4 | |
6 | 1 | 4 | |
7 | 1 | 1 | |
7 | 1 | 1 | |
7 | 0 | 1 | |
7 | 0 | 1 | |
7 | 0 | 1 | |
7 | 0 | 0 | |
2 | 0 | 0 | |
2 | 0 | 0 | |
1 | 0 | 0 |
The Leafs, evidently, are betting that they can do better in the future. They’ll have to for this to work.
“Can we take what we have and continue to build it out and show tangible strides next season?” Dubas said of their challenge in sticking with the same approach. “Until we do it, it’s a fair criticism to levy towards me.”
The other thing they’re banking on is their stars eventually delivering in the playoffs, a not unreasonable bet given the talent but a touchy one after the 2021 playoffs.
One not-oft mentioned downside of the top-heavy approach the Leafs are sticking with: It might end up pricing important players like Hyman and Morgan Rielly out of Toronto, forcing the organization to replace them somehow.
Speaking of which …
What are the Leafs’ plans for Zach Hyman and Morgan Rielly?
These are different situations, obviously.
One, Hyman, is a pending free agent. The other, Rielly, still has a year left ($5 million on the cap) on his deal before he gets there.
One is pressing. One less so.
With Hyman, the Leafs want to keep him, not surprisingly.
“He’s certainly someone that we’ll try to bring back,” Dubas said, raving, as per usual, about Hyman’s performance and personality. “(Free agency is) a big opportunity for Zach, and it’s a big decision for us as well.”
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Of note, with the expansion draft looming in July, Dubas said: “I don’t think our expansion equation is overly perilous to where signing somebody that deserves to be signed would have a major impact. So if we can get those done, we will.”
In other words, the Leafs are prepared to sign Hyman now even if it means adding him to — and crossing someone else off — their off-limits list for Seattle.
As for Rielly, the GM was less committal.
And why would he be with the real clock on a decision more than a year away? (You could argue, as James Mirtle did on the latest Leaf Report podcast, that the Leafs need to sign Rielly or trade him. I disagree. With the Leafs in championship mode, there’s nothing wrong with keeping Rielly, who played the most minutes on the team in the regular season and playoffs, through next season and see where things stack up in 2022.)
“Morgan is a huge part of what we do here,” Dubas said.
Dubas noted the flat salary cap had made extensions rare across the league. Many teams had key players, including captains, head into their walk years without any certainty of a deal, he explained.
“You never want to do that if you don’t have to with guys that are a key part of your team, but I think patience is a good thing,” Dubas said.
Still, the Leafs intend to discuss the matter with Rielly’s agent, J.P. Barry, and get a read on their side of things.
Unless it’s a major bargain, it’s hard to see this happening in 2021.
On a different front: Dubas said the Leafs are, not surprisingly, interested in having Spezza return for another season, though the Leafs GM noted that a discussion with Keefe was required first to nail down Spezza’s role for the coming season.
(On a related note, it’s safe to say Keefe will return as head coach.)
In defence of Matthews and Marner
Both the president and GM came to the defence of their two best players, Matthews and Marner.
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“I think disposing of two players of their calibre because the puck didn’t go in the net for them in a seven-game series,” Dubas said before trailing off.
Then, he continued: “I think if after the fourth game (against Montreal), if you weren’t super critical of them, to go after (them after) the seventh game and begin to turn on them and be critical from a manager’s perspective would be foolish.
“These are two awfully great young players that showed it over the entire regular season what they’re capable of. Each have had success in the playoffs previously.”
Dubas pointed, in particular, to Marner’s productive series in 2017 and 2018 against Washington and Boston. Marner amassed a combined 13 points in 13 games in those two series when the Leafs were an overmatched young team.
Since then, however, he’s produced 12 points in 19 games and has gone 18 straight playoff games without a goal.
“I have tremendous belief in both of them,” Dubas said. “I think they’ve shown to everybody what they’re capable of over time, and I know as we continue to go through these seasons and through these playoffs that the story will be different for them in the future in terms of the way people speak about them following the playoffs.”
Shanahan suggested that many great players over the years had similar experiences early in their careers before they came up large in the postseason and won championships. Maybe the best recent example of that: Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom, who finally won it all in their 10th postseason in Washington three years ago.
“The teams that were wise enough to hang on to (their stars), and to continue to surround them and develop them, and just keep trying and trying and getting better and improving, benefited eventually,” Shanahan said.
“History will tell you that it can be done.”
Shanahan noted that he didn’t win the first of his three championship rings until his 10th NHL season.
The Leafs will look to rectify their close-out issues
There was plenty of talk on this day about “killer instinct.”
I have to be honest: That phrasing, or maybe even the narrative itself, doesn’t sit right with me. Would the Leafs have possessed so-called killer instinct had Matthews, say, scored on his backhand in overtime of Game 6?
What is fair, and what Shanahan, Dubas and Keefe all spoke to, was the need for their team to continue playing the same productive way even when the stakes rose higher — not, as Dubas said, revert to caution.
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The Leafs started Games 5, 6 and 7 tentatively and paid for it. Is that killer instinct? I guess so.
“Unfortunately, and I know it’s not what people want to hear, but moments like this are a part of the story that prelude success most of the time,” Dubas said of the repeated early playoff failures. “That’s what I believe and am banking on here as we guide this ship ahead.”
Shanahan did wonder aloud about the whole killer instinct thing, and whether the Leafs needed to address it somehow. He also thought players could develop it just by going through those experiences again and again before finally breaking through. (The Toronto Raptors come to mind here.)
“Once you do it for the first time, it’s something that you don’t forget how to do,” he said.
“It’s a great question that I often ponder as well,” Dubas said regarding the question of whether that mentality can be learned or whether extra winning oomph needs to be acquired alongside it. “And so I bounce back and forth in terms of: Do you need four, five or six guys that have won (the Stanley Cup)? Or do you need guys that are desperate to win that can instill that extra bit and push in bigger games?”
The Leafs initially added Spezza for the wisdom — but also a desperation to win — that he would bring to the group. Same with Thornton and Simmonds last offseason. Then they added Nick Foligno, another vet without a Cup, at the trade deadline.
It felt like the Leafs went too far on this front. That they overly invested in that dimension and sacrificed youth, speed and skill in the process, which hurt them at playoff time.
“I’ve tried not to — maybe others would disagree — take a stubborn, one-way approach to it,” Dubas said of roster building. “You’re trying to balance the talent level of the group and the experience with competitiveness, with grit and production and all the objective and subjective things that go into building the roster.
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“I think trying to find and strike the perfect balance is going to be the key.”
Who joins Jack Campbell in next year’s crease?
Dubas wouldn’t rule out a return for Frederik Andersen, who’s a pending UFA. Although I’m not sure he would’ve gone on record stating the opposite after all that Andersen has accomplished for the franchise. (He has the fourth-most wins of any Leafs goalie.)
The Leafs GM said he reminded Andersen of that in their exit meeting: How important he’d been to the franchise in solidifying a long-unsteady crease after joining the team from Anaheim.
“With Fred, if there’s something that works out, I would say that there’s interest on our side as well,” Dubas said. “It’s just probably a different discussion than would’ve been had before the year.”
Which means that, for a much smaller number and term than the Leafs might have considered before this year, they would be willing to look at it.
There aren’t a lot of great options out there in goal in free agency. So maybe the Leafs end up circling back to Andersen if they can’t find an alternative, modestly priced solution to join Campbell?
It would be a tough sell, though, to bring back Andersen, as well as the Core Four, plus Hyman and Rielly, after everything that went down against Montreal.
Some change is going to be healthy.
One final note, however: The Leafs do have interest in re-signing Galchenyuk, another pending UFA, so there’s that to consider as well.
(Top photo of Brendan Shanahan and Kyle Dubas: Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)