Guilt Trip
Active member
He did say a D man with bite. I didn't say he was good lol.CarltonTheBear said:
2020-2021 Toronto Maple Leafs General Discussion
- Thread starter herman
- Start date
Highlander
Active member
After watching the marathon Bolts/Jackets game yesterday, I actually felt a bit relieved about our result. That frikken goalie is unbelievable, like 80 something saves, almost unbeatable. And like the Leafs the Bolts vastly outplayed Columbus (but got the reward in the exhausting finish).
That we lost to some super hot goalie is not real shameful. Sort of like Rutherford saying they ran into Carey Price. Hard problems to solve.
Hope we draft a goalie or two.
That we lost to some super hot goalie is not real shameful. Sort of like Rutherford saying they ran into Carey Price. Hard problems to solve.
Hope we draft a goalie or two.
ZBBM
Active member
Interesting little aside from Friedman (lose the ridiculous beard BTW Eliotte) about the nature of Dubas's promise to Nylander. Not that it matters; promises were made to be broken, and this song proves it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=912DKxD0H1U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=912DKxD0H1U
Highlander
Active member
agreed ZZBM, the beard has to go or be trimmed to Sigmund Freud length. The Walt Whitman thing on acid doesn't work for me either.
Kin
New member
Frycer14 said:
Even if the team could trade a forward and get back a defenseman of equal value, which is incredibly hard to do, then I still don't think that's a solution. The team needs to be better, not just have talent shifted from one area to the other.
Reality is, the improvement they need isn't going to come externally. Even if they had a ton of cap space the odds of being able to land major talent upgrades in free agency isn't good and the Leafs have already done that. What separates the Leafs from the teams we want them to be like isn't whether or not they've signed good free agents or if they've added top talent with high draft picks, it's the next component. It's adding guys of high value without having high picks or huge cap dollars. That's probably the toughest avenue but it's something that just about every single top tier team has done and, quite frankly, one of the reasons the Leafs are in the situation they are is because the initial relative success of the Matthews era got people all impatient again and so the team didn't maximize their rebuild and so we needed just about every single one of their picks to be a homerun and, well, that's too tough a standard for anyone.
The solution here is more talent. Without cap space, that means internal development. That may be slow and frustrating and some of the rebuilding pain people thought we'd skipped by virtue of going from the 1st overall pick to the playoffs in a year may be coming but, honestly, this isn't a deck shuffling problem. This is a "We need to find our Letang/Keith/Holtby" kind of thing.
Guilt Trip
Active member
Next year is year 5 after the tank. Patience has run out in Leafland. I havent goven uo on Dubas yet. I rhonk hes a smart guy and will straighten the team out.
Guilt Trip said:
The heat on him, and the big-4 and maybe even Shanahan, will be drastically different if something like this happens again next year.
Frank E
Active member
CarltonTheBear said:
Given the lack of playoff revenue expectations during this weird period, I think Shanny and Dubas get a pass because who cares.
I don't think Shanahan survives given this is his second GM if things don't go well next season. No doubt there's going to be heat on Dubas.
OldTimeHockey
Active member
I'm not entirely sure how anyone in the media can put as much stock in this best of 5 loss as they would in any other playoff year. I certainly can't bring myself to.
Highlander
Active member
They have at least two more years. Nik is right, they need to find their team from the seeds they have sown. (and add the few right pieces).Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate said:
OldTimeHockey
Active member
Frank E said:
Sure, it was a "playoff series"...after a 5 month layoff with a 2 week window to get ready. Essentially, the Leafs started their season 2 & 3 and everyone is ready to blow up the team
Hobbes
New member
Frank E said:
I also think Muz's loss was a major -- if not the -- deciding factor, perhaps even beyond the goaltending duel. The Leafs simply had nobody at all able to step into his minutes/role. The same would have been true if Matthews had gone down, or to only a slightly lesser extent Tavares or Reilly.
Most teams can lose some of their pieces and survive in the playoffs, but there are a few key irreplaceable cogs that simply cannot be lost if you're going to have any chance of winning a series.
I quite liked DGB's piece in the Athletic today [subscription link]
herman
Well-known member
Hobbes said:
I think there's a chance Hakstol doesn't come back either. Keefe came in partway through the season and normally they get a chance to hire their own bench team.
Friedman hinted at Boudreau being available, even though he's clearly a head coach.
Keefe, AJ MacLean (off), Bruce Boudreau (def) wouldn't bother me.
Kin
New member
Guilt Trip said:
Leaving aside the fact that moves made to satisfy impatient fans are almost certainly going to be bad ones there's just an inescapable reality here that impatience doesn't impact.
They're not good enough. Their prospect base is terrible. The "tank" was never really embraced because the only year where they actually shed assets to be bad didn't see them do it fully which means they never grew the sort of depth they needed. Look at Ottawa's collection of picks this year for an example of how these things realistically need to be done.
Impatience in Leafland doomed the team to irrelevance for 25 years. It'd be a real shame if more of it derailed the only promising start the Leafs have had in that time.
Phileas Fogg
New member
It's going to be a very interesting offseason, insofar as how covid will affect the landscape. You've got teams like the leafs that are essentially capped out and were counting on a scaled increase that won't happen, and you've also got other franchises with an internal cap that will want to shed money due to the revenue conditions.
It's going to be really hard to move a player without taking money back. Dubas in his press conference mentioned that the leafs have more cap room than people think, but I'm at a loss to figure out how.
It's going to be really hard to move a player without taking money back. Dubas in his press conference mentioned that the leafs have more cap room than people think, but I'm at a loss to figure out how.