What led to another lost Maple Leafs season? Within the errors and miscalculations of management

The Toronto Maple Leafs didn’t want Kyle Dubas to talk on locker cleanout day last spring.

First they wanted to resolve their unstable contractual situation. But Dubas felt it was right to talk to the players and head coach Sheldon Keefe to address what went wrong for the Leafs, once again, in the playoffs.

Management took a different approach this year, one that departed from previous precedent: They would speak on Friday, four days after the players and Keefe.

Speaking that day will be MLSE President Keith Pelley, Team President Brendan Shanahan and General Manager Brad Treliving. (The team initially announced an availability Thursday with unspecified members of management before changing course.)

Which leads to days of uncertainty about what direction the Leafs plan to take, including whether Keefe will return next season.

What we do know is that year-plus mistakes by those responsible are partly to blame for another lost Leafs season.

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It’s probably best to start with the decision not to renew Dubas’ contract before the start of the 2022-23 season.

Regardless of whether you thought Dubas did a good job or not as GM of the Leafs, not extending his contract created the type of situation any well-run organization should try to avoid. Which was the need to negotiate a new deal for the general manager at the beginning of the offseason.

When those negotiations went awry and Shanahan decided to suddenly fire Dubas, the Leafs were left without a general manager weeks before the draft and the start of free agency. Which meant they had to hurry to find someone new. Which meant that someone new, Treliving, hired less than two weeks after Dubas was fired, would have only an outside view of the team and its needs ahead of the most important roster-building time of the year.

Which was demonstrated in Treliving’s first transactions as GM.

Their first move was to sign David Kämpf to a four-year contract, with a salary cap hit of $2.4 million, days before the start of free agency. Their second and third moves (minus a new contract for Pontus Holmberg): signing Ryan Reaves to a three-year deal, with a cap hit of $1.35 million, and John Klingberg to a one-year deal, with a cap hit of $4.15 million. .

In the end, it was almost $8 million spent on three players who contributed almost nothing (and literally nothing in Klingberg’s case) to the Leafs in the postseason.

Money that could have been spent elsewhere: on the blue line, for example, or at center ice.

Reaves was eliminated with the team’s season on the line in Games 6 and 7. The Leafs were outscored 2-1 when he was on the ice with a problematic expected goals mark of 32 percent. His playoff goal drought is 70 games. (The last one arrived on May 28, 2018). Reaves turned things around in the regular season, but the likelihood that he, at 37, would play a limited role in the playoffs was entirely foreseeable.

Kämpf was costly for a fourth-line center who contributed nothing offensively. He scored the first goal of the playoffs for the Leafs and after that he didn’t do anything offensive. Which wasn’t surprising. Kämpf had some effective minutes in the second half of the series with Boston, buried in the defensive zone with Connor Dewar.

But ultimately getting almost no offense into the bottom six proved to be costly in a series in which the Leafs scored 12 goals in total. In fact, Kämpf was the only player on the back two lines to score in all seven games against the Bruins. Dewar and Reaves were the only other players to record even a point: an assist each on Kämpf’s goal in the opener.

Holmberg was left without points in the playoffs. So did Nick Robertson, Calle Järnkrok and Noah Gregor.

Tyler Bertuzzi, signed to a one-year deal worth $5.5 million to help the offense in the playoffs, scored just once against the Bruins.

The Leafs only had two lines that were conceivable scoring threats and one of those lines, John Tavares’ unit, had to spend the entire series playing David Pastrnak in a matchup-style role.

Tavares’ offensive zone faceoff percentage in the series: Just under 34 percent. Tavares lined up for nearly twice as many faceoffs in the defensive zone (53) as he did in the offensive zone (27) at five-on-five. The Leaf with the third-most goals during the regular season (29), a 33-year-old in his 15th NHL season, had to start on defense more often than not. He scored a goal in the series, on the power play.

Mitch Marner, who played alongside him for half the series after a 26-goal regular season, also scored just once.

Asking two of the team’s four best offensive players to chase Pastrnak all series was not ideal.

Keefe simply didn’t have a better option for those minutes.

That was a result of roster construction, which began last summer when Ryan O’Reilly, the third center in last year’s playoffs, decided to leave in free agency.

He was not replaced, either in the offseason or during the season, when the need for a capable two-way center behind Matthews and Tavares became apparent (which was early). The Leafs were left using Holmberg, with 91 games of NHL experience, as a 3C in the playoffs, a role that was beyond his capabilities at this point.

Management decided not to spend a first-round pick on Adam Henrique like the Oilers did and couldn’t get the assets to sign Alex Wennberg from Seattle like the Rangers did. Both Edmonton and New York advanced to the second round. The Leafs added only Dewar to the advanced mix.

With a more capable two-way center, Keefe could have set up Tavares, in particular, for the offense more often than he did. It wasn’t until the end of the series that Keefe began to do just that, with Kämpf taking on more responsibility in the defensive zone.

Kämpf’s offensive limitations kept him in the 4C role for most of the season. It’s a role Holmberg could have played for much less.

Last offseason, the Leafs lost a host of penalty killers (O’Reilly, Noel Acciari, Alex Kerfoot, Justin Holl, Luke Schenn) in free agency and didn’t replace any of them until the trade deadline with deep parts like Joel Edmundson. , Ilya Lyubushkin and Dewar.

It was not enough.

After the power play, perhaps nothing was more damaging to the Leafs’ chances in the first round than the penalty kill, which led to six goals in the first four games of the series, three of them losses.

For much of the regular season, the Leafs’ number one defensive pairing on penalties was TJ Brodie and Mark Giordano, only one of whom (Brodie) played in the playoffs. There were signs in last year’s playoffs that a Brodie slide could be imminent.

Leafs brass tried to get a push for the blueline in the fall, but were rebuffed in their attempts to bring in Chris Tanev and Nikita Zadorov from Calgary.

The need to seek serious help dates back to the offseason, when the team decided to take a chance on Klingberg, even though he was coming off two troubled seasons.

He struggled for 14 games before undergoing hip surgery. Which was not a good look for management. If the Leafs weren’t aware of his hip issues, why sign him in light of the other concerns? And if they were aware, again, why sign him?

There wasn’t much available, to be fair, although the Canucks did get Ian Cole for $3 million on a one-year deal and Carson Soucy for $3.25 million annually on a three-year deal. Even when the Leafs got a get-out-of-jail-free card with Klingberg on LTIR, they chose not to spend that money.

Edmundson and Lyubushkin were No. 5-caliber defenders on a team that already had enough of them.

The Leafs’ unwillingness to spend a first-round pick on Tanev was understandable given his age and injury history. Was there no way to acquire the second-round pick that Calgary sought and that Dallas ultimately paid as part of a package to land Tanev?

Was there no chance to improve the team before the trade deadline in a way that would matter?

In the end, the Leafs spent five picks on Lyubushkin, Edmundson and Dewar. The team chose to prioritize the future (keeping first-round picks and prospects like Fraser Minten and Easton Cowan) and ended up with very little.

Red flags were also dropped with Ilya Samsonov.

In the end, a safe and uncreative approach at the deadline backfired on the Leafs.

The same went for the status quo approach of bringing back the core and Keefe once again. If the organization hadn’t had to search for a new general manager in the final weeks of May, if they had simply retained Dubas, the team could have explored the trade market for someone like Marner before his no-movement clause went into effect. They could have altered the team in a way that was important for the postseason.

Given Shanahan’s apparent advantage, that prospect was quickly dismissed.

Now, the Leafs can only move someone like Marner with their involvement and that of their agent, if they decide to move him at all. (He can stay if he wishes).

By not addressing the media on Monday, management left Keefe’s status as head coach up in the air, just as they did last summer after the general manager change. Keefe then signed a two-year extension, while new assistants Guy Boucher and Mike van Ryn came on board.

Van Ryn seemed to get everything he could out of the group on defense. Boucher, however, in his return to the NHL, couldn’t find any answer for a power play that fell apart down the stretch of the regular season.

There was reason to move on from Keefe last summer when the Leafs failed to advance beyond the second round in his fourth playoffs as head coach. Doing so now would seem like another one of those decisions that come a year too late, although it must be said, once again, that Keefe’s hands were tied in many ways due to personnel issues.

The fact that Keefe has had the best goalie in a series only once (when Samsonov beat Andrei Vasilevskiy in the first round last spring) is probably an overlooked aspect of his flawed playoff resume. That being said, the lack of offense in the playoffs year after year is hard to look past, as are the final results.

It all adds up to another lost year for the Leafs.

(Top photo: Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)