Toronto Maple Leafs: Is Kyle Dubas effective come playoff time?

It’s time for the Toronto Maple Leafs to take a look in the mirror and realize how far they have to go to be Stanley Cup contenders.

Last night, the Columbus Blue Jackets did it again. They took on a team that was ranked higher than they are and dictated the pace of the game through their grit and pugnacity. Just like last year, the Blue Jackets and emerged as the victors against an opponent known for their high flying offense in the Toronto Maple Leafs.

But this time, they did it without marquee names like Sergei Bobrovsky (their two-time Vezina winning goalie), Artemi Panarin, Matt Duchene, and Ryan Dzingel. They did it with the plug-in-play system laid out by head coach John Tortorella. To many hockey fans, this qualifying round came to a surprise to many. But should it have been?

In a year that marred by drama both on and off the ice, the Toronto Maple Leafs were a team that you could write a soap opera series about. It started with Auston Matthews’ incident with a female security guard.

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Next, there was Mitch Marner’s contract negotiations, in which the player himself had to take over his own negotiations, and continued with Mike Babcock’s firing. The Leafs lost to the Carolina Hurricanes in which the latter was forced to play Toronto’s minor league Zamboni driver David Ayres in net. You could argue that the way this season finished was indicative of the unexpected storylines that were coming out of Leafs Nation.

To many, the Leafs were expected to not only make the playoffs, but make a push to the second and third rounds. However, when looking at their roster on paper, was their collective assessment correct? Gone was the grit of Leo Komarov, Matt Martin, and fan-favorite Nazem Kadri. The latter being traded after two suspensions in consecutive years in playoff series versus the Boston Bruins and in ushered the high flying finesse of Alexander Kerfoot and Jason Spezza.

General Manager Kyle Dubas got rid of the excuses that Leaf fans pinned their previous playoff woes on. Gone was Nazem Kadri, the defense scapegoat Jake Gardiner, and Mike Babcock, who limited his top players’ ice time in crucial games. On paper, it would seem that pugnacity was lost, and in this past best-of-five qualifying round against the Columbus Blue Jackets, it showed.

For a team that was poised to make a strong push in the playoffs, this year’s Maple Leafs looked like anything but. The style of speed and puck possession Dubas often speaks about looked feeble, as the team was consistently getting beat in the corners, getting discombobulated when Columbus plugged their defensive zone, and getting outshot against a defensive squad.

Now to be fair, the Leafs did manage two wins, one of which where they came back from a three-goal deficit to tie Game 4 with three and a half minutes to go in regulation and win it in overtime thanks to an Auston Matthews’ powerplay goal. This gave Leaf fans something that they are all too familiar with, something that hurts more in the long run – hope and a false sense of security.

Other than those last few minutes in Game 4 and most of Game 2, the edge, drive, and heart weren’t there. It took a Jason Spezza fight in Game 4 to inspire the team to up their level of play, but it looked like it was all for nothing when it came to Game 5.

The Leafs seemed like they were just going through the motions. Yes, they were getting a lot of shots on net, but they were not high-quality opportunities, which provided Blue Jackets’ goaltender Joonas Korpisalo with some routine saves.

When it came down to the biggest game of the Leafs’ season and with it all on the line for Game 5, rookie head coach Sheldon Keefe mixed the lines. Andreas Johnsson (a player who was injured and hadn’t played a game since mid-February) came in for rookie standout Nicholas Robertson.

He also put John Tavares, Mitch Marner, and Auston Matthews together. In doing so he had to juggle the line, putting William Nylander at center. Nylander looked a little lost as compared to how he usually plays on the wing.

You have to acknowledge that the injury sustained to Jake Muzzin in Game 2 definitely hindered the Leafs. But in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, teams that have been successful are multifaceted and the Leafs are just not that. Their experience the last few years has proven that weakness and this year, it didn’t take the Boston Bruins to expose that fact.

Mike Babcock was preaching for his entire tenure that they had to be beefier along the wings and get tougher on the defensive end – something he and Kyle Dubas would publicly disagree about, but the latter was the GM and he wanted a streamlined offense.

Sometimes the offense dries up and teams need to rely heavily on their defense and goaltending to win them games. The Leafs don’t have the defense or goaltending necessary to do so and it showed against Columbus.

Fredrik Andersson put up good numbers in this series but once again, when it came to having the season on the line, he didn’t make the saves that he needed too. Though their defense core certainly didn’t help.

Morgan Rielly, while dependable at times, made costly mistakes. Outside of Rielly, the defense is paper thin on talent. Cody Ceci and Martin Marincin sometimes looked confused as to what team they played for, giving up costly turnovers and missing shots on net by a wide margin. Liam Foudy’s goal in Game 5 to put the Jackets up 2-0 was the embodiment of the Leafs’ ineptitude in their own zone.

Now, let’s get to the big four – Matthews, Marner, Tavares, and Nylander. The embodiment of how in-season success doesn’t guarantee playoff success. The fact that the New York Islanders have made it farther without John Tavares should be somewhat of a red flag for Leafs fans, but when you look at the last three years of the final games of each series for the Leafs, these four players have underperformed in a major way.

When you look at Game 7 in 2018, 2019, and last night’s Game 5 loss, they have one goal (Tavares in 2019), and three assists split between Marner and Nylander in the 2018 7-4 loss to the Boston Bruins. The team has also been outscored 15-5 in that span. Simply put, you can’t win on talent alone.

How the Leafs go about their woes moving forward is unknown and difficult moving forward, as the salary cap in frozen for the next three years at $81.5 million. It’s a problem that put the Leafs in a vice grip when it came to the trade deadline, as they are so close to the cap to the extent that they were slightly over the cap when they activated Johnsson from the Injured Reserve.

Simply put, the Leafs are in a mess with their contracts. They still have many players to re-sign and unless they nab the first overall pick in tonight’s draft lottery, they lose their first-round pick to Carolina after the latter took on Patrick Marleau’s contract so the Leafs can make room for Mitch Marner’s extension.

Maybe Dubas can finally seem what Babcock was trying to get across all these years. Yes, Babcock made mistakes during his tenure as the head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and in no way am I arguing the validity of his firing. But he had a point when it came to inserting toughness and big-bodied players into your line up if you want to have a shot at making a deep playoff run.

Yes, the Leafs put up successful regular season numbers, but that doesn’t translate into the playoffs especially after a four-month layover due to the Coronavirus pandemic. At this point, Leaf fans are disappointed but not surprised. They don’t have any words and they don’t want to hear them. At this point, their anger, their frustration, their sadness – everything they’re feeling – is understandable. This isn’t the ending they imagined, and certainly not the one they wanted.