Why Your Team Sucks: Toronto Maple Leafs

2021 SEASON:

The Leafs spent the year being followed around by an Amazon documentary crew for a series called All or Nothing. You’ll be shocked to find out which one they chose!

Let’s start with the good news: the Leafs won their first division title in 21 years. Never mind the fact that it was the Ron MacLean Wet Dream Division Presented By Tim Horton’s; you take the victories where you can get them. Auston Matthews won the Rocket Richard trophy, while Mitch Marner was the first Leaf since Mats Sundin to finish top 5 in scoring. “Surely this momentum will carry through the postseason,” said someone still waiting to be paid by that Nigerian prince.

Now that the boring heartwarming stuff is done, let’s play the hits!

• They signed Joe Thornton to instill winning leadership, which is akin to getting driving lessons from Dale Earnhardt.
• They blew a 5–1 late second period lead to the Ottawa Senators, which included being scored on by someone named Artem Zub.
• They lost two straight games to a Vancouver Canucks team that hadn’t played in over two weeks due to COVID and whose players were practically still on ventilators. You’ll be shocked to find out they blew leads in both games.
• They traded a 1st and 4th round pick for Nick Foligno, who played a handful of games, never scored a goal, got injured within two weeks, and then peaced out for one of their biggest rivals.
• They traded a draft pick for David Rittich, who played like three games and allowed several goals that looked like a video game glitched out.
• Matthews and Marner flubbed an easy 2-on-0 in an overtime loss to Montreal, because irony is fun!

Now we come to the piece de resistance: blowing a 3–1 series lead to their biggest rival, who finished 18 points back of them in the standings, lost more games than they won, and would not have made the playoffs in literally any other division. They were not only one game away from putting the Habs away, but one goal away. Twice. It will shock you to know that the Leafs once again played Game 7 with the enthusiasm of a person whose job is “emails” working on the Friday before a long weekend. The only thing they did in that game was score a garbage time goal while Montreal was already busy celebrating.

Marner had more puck-over-glass penalties in Game 6 (two) than goals in the entire series (none).

HEAD COACH:

Sheldon Keefe. A lot of Leaf fans are hankering for Bruce Boudreau, who is spending his days waiting by the phone for MLSE to call at this point. Let me repeat that: Leaf fans are at the point where they consider a coach who is famous for playoff failure to be an upgrade.

Keefe’s biggest asset at this point is not being Mike Babcock. He ensures his stars get 25 minutes a night in January so they can look like they’re skating in molasses in April. When the season’s on the line, he’s either going to tinker with lines by pulling names out of a hat, or rigidly stick with what hasn’t been working. His power play last year was groundbreaking, in that it tested the limits of how far you can go with calling something a power play before you get sued for negligent misrepresentation.

NEW THINGS THAT SUCK:

The Leafs traded for Jared McCann only to lose him to Seattle within a week. In the process, Leaf fans read way to much into a video of a guy catching a fish, which is still comparatively one of the more normal things they’ve done. The Leafs were the only team to engage in something resembling a side deal for the expansion draft, which every other team avoided after Vegas stole their lunch money. They gave up something to ensure they lost nothing. Kyle Dubas is playing 4D chess here; what a visionary!

We have some new annual recipients of the Maple Leafs Bargain Bin Free Agency fund. Nick Ritchie is here, presumably to help the Leafs get more powerplays by ensuring they get even-up calls for the 17 penalties he will take every game. Ondrej Kase should be good for about 12 games before he comes down with Joffrey Lupul Syndrome and is never heard from again. I have no idea what a Michael Bunting is, but he brings the intangible quality that’s most important to this team: playing junior hockey in Sault Ste. Marie.

Frederik Andersen has gone to Carolina to become the second goalie in history that they’ve poached from the Leafs’ payroll to beat the Leafs. Zach Hyman went to Edmonton so he could get paid tenfold for the privilege of propping up a superstar who can’t produce in the playoffs. Zach Bogosian hated the Leafs so much that he agreed to let Tampa to pay him in Monopoly money just to go back there.

Replacing Andersen is Petr Mrazek, who had a .902 SV% in the playoffs with Carolina. If nothing else, he brings a wealth of experience to the team of actually having won a Game 7 in his lifetime.

THINGS THAT STILL SUCK:

Welcome to Year Six of the Auston Matthews Era! The greatest rebuild of all time- according to any Leaf fan you had the misfortune of standing within a five-foot radius of between 2017 and 2019- has managed to improve from a mediocre team that loses in the first round in six games to a much better team that loses in the first round in seven games. It truly is the little details that matter.

I’ll preface this by saying that hockey is a random sport and you never truly know what will happen. Good teams lose all the time because a single bounce might not have gone their way. Bad teams can go on deep runs solely because their goalie got hot at the right time. The NHL playoffs are a cruel, unrelenting, and chaotic animal. It’s like a deer running through your house, except I think that might get higher ratings in some parts of the US.

That is to say, hockey is random except when it comes to the Leafs. There is hope for literally every team in the NHL but this one. The Oilers may be a walking punchline, and even their fans can boast having watched their team win a playoff series in HD. Only the Panthers boast a longer series win drought, and you can bet your bottom dollar that’s absolutely gonna change this year. The Leafs haven’t won a series since Facebook was little more than a campus directory that existed entirely because Mark Zuckerberg was horny. The greatest source of misinformation on that website is people believing the Leafs can win anything.

The fun isn’t in if the Leafs will lose, but how. Star players won’t show up? Bad turnovers? Goalie in the crapper again? John Tavares got in a bar fight over whether Lord Palmerston or Pitt the Elder was Britain’s greatest prime minister? A Leftovers style event occurs where 2% of the population mysteriously disappears in the middle of a tied Game 7 and it leaves the Leafs shorthanded on a 5-on-1? Nothing is off the table here. Use your imagination!

I’m like a broken record repeating myself, but no fanbase deserves this much pain except this one. This is, bar none, the dumbest fanbase in North American professional sports, and I’m fully accounting for the fact that half of the NFL fanbases have mainlined horse paste and consider camo jorts to be formal wear. The portion of Leaf fans who recite anything Don Cherry said in 1996 like it were from Ecclesiastes are dumb. The Leaf fans on Twitter who purport to be smarter than those fans are somehow even dumber. The intra-fanbase discourse on any social media site is that scene from The Simpsons where they play a game consisting of running into each other headfirst wearing a pot on their head.

This year’s target of scorn is Mitch Marner. Leaf fans have honestly convinced themselves that the best playmaker they’ve had since Doug Gilmour is the sole cause of all of life’s problems. They actually believe that the team divesting themselves of Marner would make them better. Sure, Marner is overpaid, but can you blame him? That extra million or so is really just the cost of playing in a market where grown men get irate on your social media because you got engaged or have a puppy or didn’t spend your summer like you live in present-day Australia.

Leaf fans deserve every bit of failure because nothing will ever make them happy. They clamoured for star talent for years, were given exactly what they wanted, and are now extremely mad about it. They begged to have a playoff team for about ten years, and now they’re even angrier than when their team was bad. It’s for the best that the Leafs never win the Cup, because you know even that won’t be enough. They’d spend half of that night reading Capfriendly and finding some mundane detail to get apoplectic about. They’re the NHL equivalent of England’s soccer team, in that they’re nothing more than a sad front for fat drunk middle-aged men to be angry xenophobes. Being a fan of this team should be on the DSM-5.

I read 11/22/63 over the summer and I really wish that the time portal in that book were real. I don’t want to change anything in the past; it would just be the only way I’d ever get to see the Leafs win the Cup in my lifetime.

REASONS FOR OPTIMISM:

There is no reason for optimism; they’re hopeless. I don’t care anymore. I’m just here for the Nick Ritchie memes.