Instant Reaction: Maple Leafs enter deadline all but dead in the water with sixth straight loss
The Toronto Maple Leafs have never looked this lifeless during the Auston Matthews era.
In what was, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, a pretty solid all around game until about five minutes into the third period, the Leafs lost their sixth straight game to head into the trade deadline with cries for help coming from all directions. The Rangers took the lead while being outshot by the Maple Leafs (a rarity these days) and followed it up with two goals in less than a minute not long after.
The closest thing I can compare this iteration to the Leafs to is the 2019-20 season. They were completely checked out under Mike Babcock, and despite the brief coach bump when Sheldon Keefe took over, they sat outside of a playoff spot in February 2020 before a global pandemic froze them in time.
It’s was hard for me to buy into the ‘players are checked out from the coach’ narrative earlier in the season, when they were mixing in wins every now and then. Since the end of the Olympic break and the return to NHL hockey, the Leafs have lost six games in a row, and each game, it’s more and more obvious that there’s a disconnect between the players and the coach. It’s not that they’re purposely dragging their feet and giving up on games, they just lack any sort of structure. They’re predictable every single shift, and when they begin to bend, they break, seemingly without any belief that they can do better.
That last line may sound like a familiar trope when analyzing this team, but it’s never been as bad or glaring as much as it is now. Teams in their past would save those moments for the playoffs, whereas this team appears set to miss said playoffs for the first time since Matthews was drafted.
The Berube story is one for another day, but it’s painfully obvious that his system has not been anywhere near effective enough, and the players play as if they don’t have faith in it. It’s been bad enough to force Brad Treliving into taking an unconventional selling path, the first time in a decade a Leafs GM has done that. With tomorrow’s deadline looming, it’s very possible that even if this team does sell, they’ll get better on-ice results with whatever bodies they come back with compared to the current roster.