Tipsheet: Maple Leafs stuck with same flawed plan, got same bad playoff result

Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews celebrates his goal against the Detroit Red Wings during the second period of Saturday's game in Toronto.

Former Blues heartthrob Brendan Shanahan is feeling tremendous pressure these days,

He is the beleaguered president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, a franchise with the NHL's most fervent and frustrated fan base. The Leafs just suffered still another first-round playoff exit after stubbornly following the same doomed plan this season.

Conventional hockey wisdom tells us that championship teams are built from the goal line out, with a strong netminder and a sturdy defense.

Blues general manager Doug Armstrong believes strongly in this truism - and his 2019 Stanley Cup team exemplified that. The Blues won it all despite lacking megastar forwards.

(Had the Blues kept defenseman Alex Pietrangelo, they might have enjoyed another deep playoff run or two. Instead, Petro helped the Vegas Golden Knights win the Cup last year.)

Shanahan's vision for the Leafs was to invest heavily in four high-scoring forwards and go from there. Auston Matthews ($13.25 million cap hit next season), William Nylander ($11.5 million), John Tavares ($11 million) and Mitch Marner ($10.9 million) give the team quite an offensive nucleus to build upon.

But the Leafs have churned goaltenders and failed to construct a Cup-caliber defense. Our Town's Joseph Woll emerged as a potential season-saving netminder in Toronto this season, but he was injured for Game 7 against the Boston Bruins and the Leafs were eliminated with a 2-1 loss.

"I feel like we say that every year, but it truly was an incredible group, incredibly tight," Matthews said.

"We're right there," Tavares said. "I mean, it's very small difference. And just the type of hockey that we played, the way we needed to play to give ourselves a chance to win the series, and the way we came together, the way that we stuck with it.

"There's no doubt that we're right there."

Or are they?

Shanahan replaced general manager Kyle Dubas with Brad Treliving before this season, but the formula remained unchanged. Treliving tried to toughen up the Leafs by adding former Blues Ryan Reeves and Joel Edmundson, but the team remained vulnerable because of its so-so blue line.

The Maple Leafs blundered by spending big (seven years, $77 million) to steal Tavares from the New York Islanders back in 2018. They added offense to a team that already had high-end offense and created roster imbalance.

They have maintained this imbalance through disappointing playoff after disappointing playoff. The Tavares contract has aged poorly, which doesn't help, and this spring the Leafs also sputtered offensively with Matthews missing time with illness.

Fans in Toronto are furious and many eyes will be on the Leafs to see what happens next.

Here is what folks have been writing about all of this:

Chris Johnston, The Athletic: "When Brendan Shanahan took over the Toronto Maple Leafs' hockey operations department a decade ago, he felt he needed to eliminate the organization's tendency to take 'shortcuts.' The Leafs he inherited were famous for chasing trends rather than trying to establish them. For continually shifting course whenever the wind blew them in another direction. For being good enough to just miss the playoffs every spring but never bad enough to draft and accumulate game-breaking talent. The guiding principle behind what became known as the 'Shanaplan' was really just establishing a culture in which process was valued over results. 'The challenge here in Toronto is not to come up with the plan; the challenge in Toronto is to stick to it,' Shanahan famously said in April 2015. When judged by that original objective, his time as team president should be viewed as a success. They certainly haven't wavered. Except as we sit here now, with the Leafs having lost an eighth playoff series in nine tries under Shanahan after being dispatched in another Game 7 overtime heartbreaker by the Boston Bruins, it feels well past time for the results to start dictating a shift in the overarching approach."

Ryan Lambert, EP Rinkside: "Hoo boy. Wowie. Yikes. It doesn't matter how they got there. What matters is that, yup, they blew it again. Get ready for an absolutely insufferable summer talking about, 'What are the Leafs gonna do?' I'll go ahead and raise my hand here, admit I'll be as guilty of it as anyone else. The darkness beckons us. But the reason this is gonna be so difficult to talk about is that there are so many ways this could go, and yet options are weirdly limited. They could, inexplicably, mostly stand pat. Teams have done that with highly talented cores before, keeping the top guys who continue underperforming year after year. I've heard comparisons to the early-90s Red Wings or the 2000s and 2010s Capitals, but the thing about those teams is that they got out of the first round without embarrassing themselves on multiple occasions. Still waiting on that one from the Leafs. The reason to stand pat would be simultaneously that you believe you can win with Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, Wlliam Nylander, Morgan Rielly, and John Tavares, and want to run it back one last time with that group. I don't know why you would have that belief, but that would be a possible outcome. Another reason to do that is every single player I just mentioned has a no-move clause and is signed for next season. So even if you think something has to change with that top group, if they think nothing is changing, then nothing is changing."

Steve Simmons, Toronto Sun: "It is not so cut and dried, trying to determine what to do with head coach Sheldon Keefe. The screamers — and even some non-screamers demanding change — want him fired immediately after another incomplete playoff season for the Maple Leafs. On the one hand, replacing Keefe is an obvious and necessary move. On the other, it may make no sense at all. It depends on how you choose to view the team, the coach, what he's accomplished and hasn't accomplished, in more than an emotional way. I've gone back and forth on what the Leafs should do with Keefe and find myself conflicted after this seven-game overtime defeat to the Boston Bruins in Round 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Keefe may have never coached better — or prepared his team more thoroughly — than he did for Games 5, 6 and 7 of the series with the Bruins. The Leafs began the round without star forward William Nylander. They lost Auston Matthews in the middle of the series for seven periods, but he did return for Game 7 at less than 100%. They never had the services of the emerging Bobby McMann and, just when Joseph Woll took over as the playoff goaltender du jour, he got hurt and was unable to play the final game. That's a lot for a coach to deal with — a lineup in disarray, a rag-tag defence, and some high-priced help not performing to their capabilities as well. Yet the Leafs wound up as the better team on the ice in the final three games of the series, winning two of them."

Justin Bourne, Sportsnet: "I hate to be flippant here, but this is really about Mitch Marner. When John Tavares signed his extension, it was assumed that the back-end of the deal might not be pretty and, at this point, he's no longer a player who can drive play. He can still put some pucks away if put in the right spots, but his ho-hum, semi-disappointing performance in this series was closer to expectation than letdown at this point. (That doesn't mean it's not a problem, it's just that they weren't banking on him thriving this late in the deal.) In the playoffs, the Leafs' all-world chance creator just . . .  doesn't create enough chances. Over the past three NHL regular seasons combined Marner is just outside the top-10 in points, sitting 11th with a per-game average of 1.27. But in the playoffs this season his one goal and two assists in seven games was an average of 0.43 points per game, miles short of what Leafs fans have come to expect from him. My issue with Marner's play is what changes about it in the playoffs. He's an east-west player and always will be, which is fine (or even good), but in the regular season he also puts defenses on their heels by taking off, challenging them, and making them second guess what he's going to do next. In the playoffs, his first thought with all plays seems to be east-west, frankly even south, and instead of challenging the opposing team, he resigns himself to not even trying to get to the middle or up-ice."

Ken Campbell, The Hockey News: "The Toronto Maple Leafs' Stanley Cup drought will get the seniors' discount at the pharmacy pretty soon. As you probably know, it hit The Big 5-7 when the Leafs lost Game 7 of their first-round playoff series to the Boston Bruins Saturday night. And their drought against the Bruins is even worse. The Leafs haven't beaten Boston in a playoff series since 1959. Boston has won all seven series between them since then, including in Game 7 in the past four. And it all started when the Bruins took Bobby Orr from under the Leafs' noses in the early 1960s."

Matt Larkin, Daily Faceoff: "In the end, the Leafs' Game 7 will be filed as an NHL record fifth-consecutive one-goal performance in an elimination game. The NHL's second-highest scoring team managed 12 goals in seven games with a power play converting at south of five percent. No amount of horrible injury luck, which will be revealed in greater detail in the coming days, can explain Toronto's inability to break through . . . Fittingly, Keefe referred to his team in the third person as it prepares to shift on its axis. Whether it's Keefe, disappearing act Mitch Marner, even president Brendan Shanahan - few members of this team can accurately forecast their future. Any runway is long gone . . . Eight playoff runs since 2016-17. One series win. A 0-6 record in winner-take-all games. Forget keeping the core together. The Leafs as we know them are out of chances. It's over."

MEGAPHONE

"Look, I don't think there's an issue with the core.. I think we were right there all series battling — battling hard. We got it to Game 7 OT. It's a (bad) feeling."

William Nylander, on the Leafs.

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