Toronto Maple Leafs centre Auston Matthews (34) in action against the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden on Thursday.Brad Penner/Reuters
At this point, the smart play for the Toronto Maple Leafs is trading Auston Matthews.
He is a good player, but he’s not a winner. Not in Toronto, at least. He’s had 10 years to figure it out. “Diminishing” would be the kind way to describe the team’s returns on his watch.
The next two Leafs seasons will be abysmal. How can one know that? Because a hockey team without prospects, without good draft picks, and without tradable assets it’s willing to trade doesn’t go from bad to good. It goes from bad to worse.
At the end of those two seasons, Matthews will be out of a contract again. At that point, he’ll either have become so badly Stockholm Syndrome’d that he’ll never leave, or he’ll run screaming.
Then what? Then you’re where the Leafs are now, minus the means with which to improve the situation.
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A smart team would convince Matthews to waive his no-trade clause over the summer and ship him south. Given his current profile in the United States, Toronto might be able to bootstrap the beginnings of a decent renovation on his value alone. If they don’t, that profile and value are two more things being frittered away.
Ambitious teams in rational markets would do that, but the Leafs cannot. Not because they lack the means, but because over the past 10 years they have become hooked on contending.
On Friday, they were busy acting like contenders, asking too much for three guys they’d already announced they wanted to be rid of. Dealing with the Leafs must be like going to a yard sale and finding out it’s being run by Christie’s.
In the end, Toronto was able to trade Scott Laughton to LA for a third-round pick (that could become a second). Unfortunately, they paid a first-rounder and a prospect for him last year.
You know what comes next, right? A winning streak.
What the Leafs are left with is functionally the same team that was terrible this year, with zero ability to make substantial changes for next year. This is what happens when half of your bad team has some sort of no-movement clause.
And yet, the Leafs will come into 2026-27 advertising themselves as contenders, because they have no other choice.
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In the sense that the Leafs use the word, contending isn’t winning. Contending is a general sense that it’s possible you could win, even if you never do and never will. Like Marlon Brando said, contending means you’re a somebody. You matter.
Do these Leafs feel like they matter? It’s not going to stop them from making promises. Just wait till you get a load of the postseason pressers. The Leafs’ decision makers are about to bury you with accountability. They’ll need to bulk-order planks for all the people walking them.
Obviously, nobody who is actually to blame is getting clipped. You think this is a coaching problem? When you’ve had three coaches with three styles with three decent runs and one result, it’s not the coaching.
Everyone who doesn’t have their own TV commercial is getting shot out of town in a cannon. They’ll be replaced by another bunch of guys who were shot in Toronto’s direction by someone else’s artillery.
Then it’s time to swap out one Scott Laughton for another, and blame them both for not being Jean Béliveau. Eventually, we will be debating the merits of convincing Morgan Rielly that he should shed his attachment to material things and join a Buddhist monastery.
All of this, every trade for a minor cog that’s treated like the arrival of Babe Ruth, every circular argument about goaltending and the value of experience, is picking around the edges of the issue. At the core of it is Matthews. He is the key to this doom cycle.
Without him, the Leafs can’t kid themselves into thinking they’re a contender, never mind their customers. They’d have to start over.
With him, things can continue on in this way for years. He’ll be Toronto’s (Stanley Cupless) Sidney Crosby.
The first thing is hard, the second thing is easy.
You can’t blame the Leafs for choosing easy. It’s what the market is telling them it wants.
A tank requires rapid-onset apathy. Fans must have lost interest, and revenue must be trending the wrong way. That’s what spurs any business to radical change.
Right now, Toronto would buy tickets to a public hanging if you put a Leafs logo on the gallows. The city likes this team good, but they also like it bad. It gives everyone something to fixate on that feels important, but is in no danger of being so.
Matthews helps in this because he is a special player in one particular regard – his ability to absorb all the emotion Toronto throws at him. The Leafs have had plenty of other stars who’ve ping-ponged between being loved and hated, but has any ever accepted it with such docility?
Critics say Matthews doesn’t care, but if that’s true, then he doesn’t care about any of it. Winning, losing, adulation, critique. He walks through it all with that drawling, half-lidded way he has of speaking, never seeming to internalize any of it. But surely it must take some sort of toll. Nobody’s that detached.
Trading Matthews would not just be an act of positive destruction. It’d be a kindness. The guy’s done his time. It was well worth a try, but it hasn’t worked out and it’s not going to. No need to start tossing clothes out of windows. This can be an amicable split. The Leafs could explain it to him that way.
But it can’t happen because Toronto, currently ranked 21st in the NHL and dropping like space debris, are contenders. Just ask them. It may take a while, but they’ll convince you.