Maple Leafs’ stroke of lottery luck should hasten split with Auston Matthews

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There’s a story about an exchange between jazz legends John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

Davis asked Coltrane why his saxophone solos were so long. Coltrane said he had trouble figuring out how things should end. Davis replied: “Try taking the horn out of your mouth.”

With that advice in mind, can you think of any team that’s been blowing longer and less effectively than the Toronto Maple Leafs?

You can see a movement growing that will confuse the developments of the past few weeks – the firing of general manager Brad Treliving, the public trials of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment CEO Keith Pelley, the hiring of new GM John Chayka, the winning of the draft lottery – with progress. It isn’t. It is the opposite. It’s just blowing harder.

What we’re talking about now is making presumptive first overall pick Gavin McKenna, 18, the new face of the franchise while the old, increasingly resentful face is still here. Does that sound like a great idea to you?

Cathal Kelly: With draft lottery win, the Leafs catch a bullet between their teeth

You take McKenna, you keep Auston Matthews, you switch out a couple of old, slow defencemen for other defencemen who are defective in some way because nothing is free and where are you? The same spot.

You’ve got a captain who doesn’t want to be here, a demoralized crew and a conference that’s leaving you behind. No teenager, no matter how good, can push that rock uphill.

Only one move has any hope of solving your problem – trading Matthews.

Put yourself in Matthews’s shoes. Everybody’s different, but we’re all kind of the same.

You’ve been running into the same wall at work for 10 years. Starting around Year 4, the wall started pushing back. Nobody’s outright blaming you for that, but it’s close and you can feel it.

You go to the Olympics, and people are surprised to learn that you have teeth. They’ve never seen them in Toronto. For the first time in a long time, it looks like you are having fun.

You get home from Milan and start getting it in the neck for showing up at the White House looking like your mom combs your hair. The team immediately collapses around you. One night, the gooniest goon in the NHL tries to hasten your eventual move into car-wash franchise ownership. All of your teammates stand around looking at you like it was your fault your knee got turned inside out.

You hate the coach, who’s just been given the kiss of life, and wouldn’t trust the new GM with your least favourite car. Now the Leafs are about to draft the younger version of you, only less worn down by failure.

If this was your job, would you want to stay?

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Now put yourself in the Leafs’ shoes. You’ve had the Best Goalscorer in Hockey™ for a decade and he has never scored a goal that actually mattered. You made him the captain and the team got worse. Most nights, he looks like he does this job as part of his bail conditions.

You’ve spent most of those 10 years trying to give him what he wants, and he seems to hate you for it. Now you’re stuck in the position of publicly begging him to come back to do his job, which pays him US$36,000 every day of the year, including Sundays.

From a management perspective, the best argument to keep Matthews is that the Leafs need to contend now. This is what happens when hockey’s main broadcaster owns hockey’s main team. It didn’t sign up to lose its shirt on a Carolina-Anaheim Stanley Cup final. It would do better with re-runs of The Cosby Show.

With Rogers in charge, the Leafs can never tank again. It is a financial non-starter.

The worst part of a tank is the coming to grips. You think you’re getting better, but you’re not. You fight it, but it only gets worse. Finally, you accept that you, like the Maple Leafs, are a losing team labouring under the delusion that it is secretly a winning one. That mental unwinding takes a couple of years. As of a week ago, the Leafs weren’t anywhere close.

Eventually, you have to tell all your customers, who don’t get it – especially the part where the ticket prices will keep going up. Then you have to fire everyone, which takes time and creates a mood of despair. We haven’t even got to all the losing.

The Leafs just skipped all of that. Right now, they are at the end point of a tank – they’ve got the No. 1 pick.

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The next part is easy. McKenna replaces Matthews. Then the Leafs trade Matthews for some or all of the other things they need.

Is this the winning recipe? No. The team probably gets a little worse in the short term. But not getting a guarantee of success isn’t a good reason to keep returning to a formula that has been unsuccessful over and over again (plus eight more overs).

The crucial factor here is hope. That’s what the No. 1 pick represents. Maybe it makes sense to trade down and get two good players instead of one great one. What matters is that whatever comes next is a break from the cursed past.

This is what everybody actually wants, even if they aren’t willing to articulate it.

Matthews wants to leave, but he doesn’t want to be the guy who demanded a trade. The Leafs want to move on, but can’t be seen to be giving up. Fans crave novelty, and all the Leafs have to offer right now is more of the same, with a couple of new nameplates on the back.

McKenna – or whoever they take in place of him – solves all of that. Months of patience with the Matthews-led Leafs can be exchanged for years of patience with the McKenna-fronted version. This is the new beginning that sells itself. You still want to be a contender? Just say that you are. People will believe that.

It’s the same in hockey as it is in the rest of life. You know you need a change but can’t figure out how to move on? Well, have you considered taking the horn out of your mouth?