Toronto Maple Leafs

[lucafen4]

Gotta love Leafs homers - fine keep up the circus and don’t win another cup for 50 years. Babcock is one of the best coaches in the NHL, but ok, fire him... who is there to replace him? Some untested minor league bench boss? What a joke

Not to mention, this is completely a construction problem - sure the Leafs have the best offensive talent (maybe in the league) but that is not a recipe for a playoff win. All season the Leafs were horrible on Defense and could not keep the puck out of their own net. Period - that does not make for a strong playoff team.

Growing up in Detroit I remember the wings teams very well that couldn’t beat the devils; couldn’t win a cup after 62 wins - offensive powerhouses... look at the Caps until last season - perennial presidents cup winners - boy could they score regular season goals whoppee!

You ask me what the biggest thing that Lidstrom did? When he was on the ice in the playoffs you could just breath relief, as teams simply just did not score during the 22-25 minutes a game when he was on the ice. Sure, other players did/can do that too (Pronger etc). The Leafs have nothing close to this - have fun with your Paul Coffee d-men and go ahead and run a great coach out of town.

He got Babcock out of the first round of the playoffs.

[FFleming5]

He got Babcock out of the first round of the playoffs.

Haha... pretty sure Lidstrom was a pretty big piece of 3 other Cup wins with Scotty B... also, I’m pretty certain Babs had Zetterberg win a Conn Smyth trophy too in 2008 with 27 playoff points or something.

Also, thank you for proving my point. Every coach needs his PLAYERS to step it up and PERFORM to win a Cup. A coach can’t score a goal, he needs his players to beat the other teams players. You show me more than one of the Leafs highly paid “star” players who stepped up in that series on their A game to win... well you can’t - the Leafs players all laid a big goose egg - obviously this is all Babcock’s fault if you live in Toronto - and Phil Kessel’s still eating those hot dogs while Marchand has the same playoff point totals as Marner and Tavares combined... makes total sense.

[blayze]

Matthews stepped up.

I would say Freddie had a pretty damn superb series as well if you look at the overall body of work. He just picked the wrong game to have an off night - the defense certainly didn't help.

[blayze]

This editorial from today's Globe summarizes it well. It is scathing, but I can't say I disagree with it.

Leafs have plenty of perspective – but they still don’t have ‘it’

Only nine months since he signed for the Toronto Maple Leafs, John Tavares already sounds like he’s been doing his bid here for 10 years.
“At some point, you’re going to have to lick your wounds, look yourself in the mirror and find ways to improve,” he said after another Game 7 loss on Tuesday night.
That’s a lot of metaphors and it doesn’t make any sense, but the Toronto jersey turns good hockey players into bad philosophers.
“Ways to improve”? They had it and they blew it. There’s no drill for that. It’s a matter of ‘it’. You have ‘it’ or you don’t. Despite all their improvements, the Leafs still don’t.
This team does one thing at a league-best level – get perspective. There’s always a lot of perspective to go around when it comes to the Leafs, which is a funny way of explaining that performing poorly at hockey can be a moral victory. You just have to have the right perspective.
Toronto got perspective when they lost in 2017 to Washington. That was a hopeful loss. That was a sign of better things to come.
They did it last year when the Leafs lost to the Bruins. That was a reminder that the club needed to add one more major piece. Tavares was it.
What’s the perspective on this one? It’s getting harder to figure.
The coach has had four years of runway. In real terms, the team is no further ahead. That’s very little return on a substantial investment of money and, far more importantly, uncritical faith.
“I thought we played pretty good,” Babcock said afterward. “They shot the puck in the net.”
That is some world-class perspective right there.
After all those years pining for the playoffs, Tavares got so used to taking April off that he accidentally did it again.
Up and down the bench, the players you’d hope would get better at this time of year got a little worse. Goalie Frederik Andersen? Good until he wasn’t. Defenceman Jake Gardiner? Why doesn’t someone hypnotize this poor guy into believing every game is Game 5?
Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner? Great in some games, good in others, invisible when it really mattered.
William Nylander has fallen so far, there no longer seems any point in criticizing him. If he’d held out the entire year and then burned a Leafs banner on YouTube before the start of the playoffs, his reputation in town would’ve ended up in better shape.
The perspective there is that the young Leafs are, well, young and will get better. Boston has a bunch of young stars – David Pastrnak, Jake DeBrusk, Charlie McAvoy. You’ll notice they don’t constantly require the benefit of perspective.
You can also get perspective on everyone else. Patrick Marleau’s battery died. Nazem Kadri didn’t just blow a fuse, but the local power grid. Jake Muzzin was physically large, just not intimidatingly so. Frederik Gauthier played a regular shift in a Game 7 which his team was losing, which is a DefCon 1 level problem for a contending team.
The only well-known Leaf who elevated his game in the post-season was Carlton the Bear.
Yet no one would go so far as to criticize anyone else. You expect omerta from the players, at least publicly. But you cannot help but contrast Babcock’s manner of accepting defeat – “I thought our series this year compared to last year, we’re a way better hockey club” – is in marked contrast to other coaches of Canadian teams that disappointed.
Winnipeg’s Paul Maurice: “Careful with excuses. We got beat.”
Calgary’s Bill Peters: “Some of the strengths we had during the regular season weren’t strengths in round one. I can’t explain it to you … We didn’t have an answer.”
In those exits, there was a sense of an important opportunity lost, and the need to change, perhaps even radically, to correct it for next time. Peters as good as said several players would be moved on.
A half hour after the Leafs turned a 3-2 series lead into another sad trombone concerto, it was already ‘On to the next’.
“We’re going in the right direction,” Babcock summarized. I guess that’s how it works when you aren’t being paid by the completed job. It’s real good perspective.
Ultimately, it’s the perspective of a profitable, well supported, underperforming franchise that has made disappointment the defining feature of its culture.
This is distinct from losing. The Leafs no longer have a losing culture. But it is one that has an enormous amount of tolerance for coming up short. Good enough is always good enough in Toronto.
The best-case scenario – and you’re going to be hearing a lot of directional messaging about this in the coming months – is that Toronto is the Washington Capitals circa 2015. A great team with great players that turns post-season molehills into mountains, and only has to figure out the difference.
Of course, even when they were blowing it, the Capitals occasionally won a series. There was a sense of urgency there because they had a generational player, had caught some local interest and knew the two things together were unlikely to intersect again in the near-term. Every time they imploded, it felt possible that had been their last, good shot. The desperation was palpable.
They took a lot of mulligans, but they weren’t stockpiling them in perpetuity. No team gets that benefit. No team can afford to. Except the Leafs.
Promise – especially artistic promise, of which athletics is a type - is only worth something insofar as it is realized.
You’re beginning to get the bad feeling that the Leafs have done a few things right – scorch the Earth, re-seed it quickly, get lucky in the draft, hire the boldest face name in the game, convince a big star to take a chance, make a few, clever cap moves – and now think they are finished.
After all, those are a lot of things done right. By Toronto’s appallingly low standard, at least.
Winning is only another right thing that may or may not happen. You just need to get the right perspective on it.

[lucafen4]

Haha... pretty sure Lidstrom was a pretty big piece of 3 other Cup wins with Scotty B... also, I’m pretty certain Babs had Zetterberg win a Conn Smyth trophy too in 2008 with 27 playoff points or something.

Also, thank you for proving my point. Every coach needs his PLAYERS to step it up and PERFORM to win a Cup. A coach can’t score a goal, he needs his players to beat the other teams players. You show me more than one of the Leafs highly paid “star” players who stepped up in that series on their A game to win... well you can’t - the Leafs players all laid a big goose egg - obviously this is all Babcock’s fault if you live in Toronto - and Phil Kessel’s still eating those hot dogs while Marchand has the same playoff point totals as Marner and Tavares combined... makes total sense.

Well... my point actually was that Babcock has won a single playoff series since Lidstrom retired. The first year he retired, also the 48gm season. 5 straight 1st round exits for the best coach in the world.

[Godin]

Babcock isn't going anywhere. At least for another year.

[lucafen4]

If we look back a couple pages... I said the same thing. A first round exit officially puts Babcock's job on the line. 19/20 season will be the make or break. Growth, lack of experience, etc... all excuses gone.

Marner, Nylander, Matthews all entering magical 4th years.

[ericdaoust]

Hyman tore his ACL in game 4

[tweetdrivr]

The Leafs chose to be booted in round one when they didnt trade for one of Carolina’s D...

[Brosive]

Kadri was asked not to travel with the team for games 5 and 7.
Do you take that as confirmation he's gone before next season?

[ericdaoust]

Kadri was asked not to travel with the team for games 5 and 7.
Do you take that as confirmation he's gone before next season?

No.

[4T2]

Kadri was asked not to travel with the team for games 5 and 7.
Do you take that as confirmation he's gone before next season?

He's a decent 2nd line C or a very good 3rd line C signed at an affordable price til 21-22. The only way they should consider trading him is if they were getting a good d-man in return. I could definitely see them moving him after his playoff indiscretions though. I think he'd fit in pretty good behind Bergeron and Krejci though.

[lucafen4]

Kadri was asked not to travel with the team for games 5 and 7.
Do you take that as confirmation he's gone before next season?

Likely for his own safety. minimize distraction.

[2014olympicgold]

So I can't find the tweet I read that said Dubas had it written in his contract he can fire Babs, but here's confirmation that he can fire Babs without board approval:
https://theleafsnation.com/2019/04/2...-mike-babcock/

same-same but different-different.

[havanablast21]

Having read Dobbers article this morning, I find it interesting how he outright shames people who suggest or even think the right move is to fire Babs. Is he a great coach? Sure. was he a part of a turn around that saw last place Toronto get into the playoffs 3 straight years and 2 back to back 100 pts season? Sure.

But trying to compare that last place team to the following year's team which introduced Matthews, Marner, Nylander and Andersen anchoring the net? There's no comparison. Does Babcock truly get all the credit?

Seems strange to me that even the biggest supporters of babcock @Dobber still admit to strategic errors (over playing less productive players like Marleau and Hainsey and under playing one of the most prolific goal scorers in the league, let alone on the Leafs in Matthews) not to mention the initial "Babcock and Matthews have a rift" and now "Marner and Babcock may have a rift"... "perhaps Dubas and Babcock too". Seems to be one common denominator there.

And sorry, I'll take Matthews, Marner and Dubas over this head coach any day of the week.

My initial knee jerk was "Fire Babcock" cause he's driving me insane. And what's the old addage... Keep doing what we're doing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Well guess what's happened 2 years in a row here? Yes year 1 can be considered an outlier as the team was playing with house money.. but seeing the exact same results after seeing Babcock commit the exact same strategic errors... when will Dobber and the Babcock lovers start to admit that maybe his shine isn't as glossy as it once was.

Maybe this team is already better than it's results. Maybe the leafs managed to get 100 points inspite of the coaching style (maybe they could have achieved more with a different system). Maybe the'd be playing now against Columbus with only Carolina/Islanders standing in their way beyond Columbus with one of the most unusual playoffs currently going on...

Way to many "maybe's" for me to read Dobber say "Shame on me for even thinking Babcock should be fired".

Maybe those supporters are still happy with current results. I am not. This team will not be the same next year and that's due to the inevitable cap crunch. This was the year that they needed to take advantage of 2 ELC's coming to an end. But they've done nothing in the playoffs with all of these ELC's. now we have to pay more... and for what... The same results?

How open can the Leaf's window be with the team they currently have?

I'm concerned. I want change. I want results.

Over to you Leaf's management.