The Toronto Maple Leafs endured a 5-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning on Saturday. The Leafs have lost all seven of their games since returning from the Olympic break.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
When reporters began to poke at the Leafs’ corpse after Friday’s trade deadline, team GM Brad Treliving shooed them away.
“I don’t look at today as the autopsy day,” Treliving said. “We got 19 games to go.”
It was understood that by “go,” what Treliving actually meant was “lose.”
On Saturday, the Leafs faced Tampa. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, the only way they could have been worse is if they’d gone back to the dressing room and reappeared in their bathrobes. Toronto lost 5-2.
“We’re pros here. This is what we get paid to do. We get paid to show up every single day,” said Max Domi.
No, no. You got paid to show up in December. You decided to take the month off instead. It’s too late to start feeling bad about that.
The same people who thought Toronto had a legitimate shot after the Olympic break have reached a new consensus – that the only way to salvage the year is by tanking so hard that they’ll see bubbles in Rochester.
Like all of the Leafs’ wacky designs, this one is high risk, but also high stupidity.
The Leafs’ 2026 first-round pick is owned by Boston, but top-five protected. Why didn’t they top-10 protect it? For the same reason the Leafs do anything – they’re live-in-the-moment types. Planning ahead is for squares and Stanley Cup winners.
Auston Matthews (34) and the Maple Leafs had the NHL's ninth-worst record going into Sunday's games. With a top-five protected first-round draft pick due to go to Boston this year, the Leafs may miss out on a talented player who could help them get back into the playoff hunt in the future.Dan Hamilton/Reuters
Were the season to end today, Toronto stands ninth from bottom in the NHL. That puts their odds at jumping to the top of the draft somewhere between infinitesimal and non-existent. In order to improve the numbers significantly, they need to lose a lot of games.
The high-risk part is that every loss improves the position of Boston’s pick. The worst case is the Bruins choosing No. 6 in the draft.
Toronto has already gifted Boston Fraser Minten in the same deal. Minten’s a 21-year-old centre who has more goals this year than all but five Leafs. That they thought this kid was disposable explains why the Leafs should hire a responsible adult to be present during all future negotiations.
Ten years ago, Matthew Tkachuk was the sixth pick in the draft. There’s a realistic world in which the Leafs could end up doing Boston’s retool for them essentially for free.
If it’s a sixth overall, everyone’s getting fired. Treliving, Domi, Carlton the Bear, the usher who fist bumps the players as they get on the ice. They might burn the arena to the ground and make every home game next year a Winter Classic.
Toronto Maple Leafs trade Nicolas Roy to Colorado Avalanche
So the question to be asked before the Leafs start spinning the tiller for a 180-degree turn is ‘Can you tank right?’ This is where the stupid part comes in.
No, of course the Leafs are incapable of tanking correctly. This team isn’t built to succeed, but it’s even less suited to giving up.
Vancouver is tanking right because, for all the faults of that organization, it did first things first – it gutted the club. Trading Quinn Hughes mid-season didn’t just denude the team of talent. It rid it of hope.
If you’re a Canuck, you know what your job is – doing your job wrong. If the regular season didn’t have a bottom, Vancouver would have fallen into the ECHL by now.
The Vancouver Canucks traded their franchise player mid-season and are sitting last in the NHL standings this year. That gives them a good shot at winning the lottery and the chance to draft Penn State forward Gavin McKenna first overall.Rick Scuteri/The Associated Press
They may end up coming out of this with the prize of the draft, Gavin McKenna. Vancouver will find a way to screw that up the same way they screwed up Hughes, but for a few years they’ll be able to kid themselves. That’s the best a hockey fan in Canada can hope for.
The Vancouver Canucks are losers, and they know it. The Toronto Maple Leafs are losers, but they don’t. They think they’re winners having a bad run of luck.
Half the guys in that room must believe that if Toronto gets the fifth pick in the draft, that’s either their job gone or them being made to look personally ridiculous. As the end approaches, each member of the Leafs’ roster will become more desperate to pad their individual stats.
The clubs below them, the ones who’ve already given up, will be going limp. The ones above them who think they’re making the playoffs will be trying to cruise to the end, uninjured. The Leafs will be somewhere in the middle, clawing at the walls.
You know how this ends, right? Toronto wins just enough to float between the sixth and 10th pick, highlighting how badly wrong Treliving got the Brandon Carlo trade. The draft lottery isn’t for two months. For every day of that time, Toronto will be working hard to convince itself that it’s going to win first pick. That what the many established pros who’ve passed through this club over the past decade couldn’t manage, a teenager will do all by himself.
Then they lose the lottery and torpor sets in. For another month, Leafs fans will pore over mock drafts, imagining the future hall of famer Boston’s about to get. All they have to look forward to is doing it all over again for Philadelphia next year. The Flyers have the Leafs’ 2027 first-round pick, this one top-10 protected, as a result of the Scott Laughton trade.
One thing has become clear about the Leafs over the last few years – the more they try to do anything, the worse it goes. Every out-of-the-box trade, every new hire or re-upped contract, every negotiation – they’ve all gone pear shaped. What was their last undeniably good decision? I defy you.
Given that history, the right thing to do isn’t trying to turn a winner into a loser simply by wishing it so. The prudent course is to do nothing. They blew it. Now is the time to pay for those bad decisions, not to make some more.
The time to do something about it comes later, after making a coherent plan. That will be neither simple nor quick nor – let’s face it – any more likely to work than the last hundred plans.