Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brad Treliving said on Tuesday that he's supporting head coach Craig Berube, as the team has fallen down the NHL's Eastern Conference standings, a quarter of the way through the season.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
With almost a quarter of the National Hockey League season behind them, the Toronto Maple Leafs are not where they expected to be.
That was the message from general manager Brad Treliving Tuesday morning as he met with the media before his team played the St. Louis Blues later in the day. However, while the team sits second-from-last in the Eastern Conference – having taken just one point from the last 10 available to them – he emphasized he’s not considering a coaching change at this juncture.
“I’ve got all the faith in our coach right now, so I don’t look at that as the issue,” Treliving said when asked about the future of head coach Craig Berube. “When you go through things like this, understandably, everything gets talked about and looked about. My job right now is to support our coach.”
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One of the biggest sources of frustration for the GM, now in his third season with the Leafs, was the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of his team, not knowing what kind of performance and effort would be put forth from one game to another.
He also discussed what he termed as the “disconnect” within his team, particularly between the defencemen and the forwards, a detachment that is affecting the Leafs’ ability to attack and defend as a unit.
“We’ve scored goals, but to me, we haven’t done the things that you need to do to generate offence on a regular basis,” he said.
“Conversely, we haven’t done the things that you need to do collectively as a group to prevent the other team from scoring. So No. 1, it’s getting back to being a connected group.”
Treliving said he wants to see the players in the locker room find the connections necessary to be a complete, competitive team.Kamil Krzaczynski/Reuters
Injuries have been a big part of the Maple Leafs’ issues so far this year, with captain Auston Matthews, forwards Scott Laughton and Nicolas Roy, defencemen Chris Tanev and Brandon Carlo, and goaltender Anthony Stolarz all currently out.
Treliving said that everyone in the NHL deals with injuries, and that dwelling on the team’s current enforced absences is part of a “losing mentality.”
And while there’s always speculation surrounding trades, and what the team may or may not do to bolster the lineup to improve its on-ice outlook, Treliving said most of the improvement must come from within the locker room.
“The majority of the problems we have need to be solved within that group,” he said. “You’re not airlifting in 15 new people tonight. This is the group we’ve got. The job of all of us is to maximize the people that you got and get them to play at the highest level that they can.”
The play of the new additions to the roster hasn’t been up to par, he added, although he would not single out individual players. However, he also added that “they need to be better.”
Nicolas Roy, who came over in the Mitch Marner sign-and-trade from the Vegas Golden Knights, had been centring the third line before going down with an upper-body injury, while off-season additions Dakota Joshua and Matias Maccelli have shown flashes of good form, but the pair have just six goals and 13 points between them.
Berube added that Roy’s game was coming around before he got injured, and while Maccelli has shown flashes of being the player who put up 57 points two years ago with the Arizona Coyotes, he needs to do so more regularly.
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“We need more on a consistent basis,” he said. “He’s capable of doing it. We’ve seen it, and we’ve seen what he can do. We need it to be every game, every night.”
Although the Leafs’ recent run of poor form has seen them plummet down the standings, the good news is that just six points separate them from first place in the Atlantic Division, currently occupied by the Boston Bruins.
That doesn’t mean much if the team can’t sort out its own game, according to Treliving.
“This is as tight and as competitive as I remember the league being,” he said. “But that’s kind of inconsequential; you can’t expect everybody else to lose so you stay afloat. You got to get your game right.”