‘The failures here start with me’: Maple Leafs GM Brad Treliving takes accountability for poor season at trade deadline
On track to miss the playoffs for the first time in a decade, general manager Brad Treliving opted to sell off pieces to recoup draft capital. Speaking to media in the wake of Friday’s deadline, Treliving took accountability for this miserable year, but said a full examination of the team’s issues is still to come.
“I don’t look at today as the autopsy day…but I think there’s a whole host of reasons,” Treliving said of Toronto’s current position. “I will take responsibility, the failures here start with me. Once we get through the end of the season, there will be all sorts of evaluation. We got off to a poor start. I look from my standpoint at some roster construction issues, lack of consistency, the inability to maintain any kind of level. There’s been a whole bunch of factors, but we’ll get to that in due course.”
“This team for a number of years has been adding at this time of the year and today was a day to try to regain some assets,” Treliving said. “At the end of the day, we were trying to be as active as we could to obtain and acquire as many young assets as we could. We were able to do what we were able to do.”
“That’s the market,” Treliving said. “I can’t speak highly enough about Scott Laughton. Not only his play, but he’s as quality a person as you can find. I’ll be the first to say, last year we paid a first and a young player in (Grebenkin) for him. … We communicated with everybody, and ultimately the market dictates. And that’s where it fell here for Scott today.”
“There was some interest in Oliver,” Treliving shared. “With term left on his contract we required a return that I thought would be fair, and nobody met that level.”
After this year, Ekman-Larsson has two more seasons left on his contract, with an annual cap hit of $3.5 million. He leads all Leafs defencemen this season with eight goals and 35 points.