Is Mitch Marner's time with the Maple Leafs coming to an end?

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It's the first day of March and Mitch Marner is in good spirits, playing his best hockey of the 2023-24 season.

He's tucked in a corner of the Toronto Maple Leafs practice facility dressing room, away from cameras and prying eyes, to explain why. That is, until he spots Ryan Reaves and Max Domi across the room, sitting in their stalls, and is reminded of an ongoing debate.

Formula One drivers were athletes, Marner shouted.

"You are the only two that don't think so!" Marner said.

Moments like that, of joy and happiness, felt rarer than ever for Marner this past season — his eighth as a Leaf.

More than ever, playing at home in Toronto, for the team he grew up cheering for, looked like it was a slog for Marner. More stressful than enjoyable. More taxing than it should be. Like the accumulation of so many scars and noise had finally beaten him down.

"Sometimes, stuff just doesn't go your way," Marner said, explaining his poor start to the season. "And then you start doubting yourself, questioning what's going on and how you're playing and stuff like that. And eventually, it gets more into the mental stage. That's where you just gotta stay patient and realize stuff will turn around."

The Leafs have been waiting for things to turn around for Marner in a meaningful way when it matters most. To mature into the leader — on the ice and off — they believe he can be.

At some point, they believed, it would happen.

That Marner would stop listening to the voices around him whispering in his ear, that he would finally ignore the relentless noise in the city.

That he would once again perform like the star he was in the postseason.

The Leafs saw him do it in 2018, when, at 20, he impressed a veteran Boston Bruins team with 9 points in a seven-game first-round loss. Or even earlier than that, not long after they drafted him in 2015, when he piled up 14 points in four games for the London Knights at the 2016 Memorial Cup, winning the tournament MVP.

What they were waiting for never came. Not yet anyway.

And now, after another early playoff exit in which Marner struggled again to make a superstar-calibre impact, the Leafs are at an apparent crossroads where they must ask themselves more seriously than before if it will ever happen — in Toronto anyway.

Marner turned 27 on Sunday. He's suited up in 633 games as a Leaf. The time to decide whether he should be a long-term part of the core is now, with Marner eligible to sign an extension on July 1.

An extension is one of three possible paths the Leafs can take him with him this offseason. The others: decide (or be forced) to let him play out the final year of his contract, ahead of unrestricted free agency next summer, or trade him first.

An extension doesn't feel the least bit tenable, not after what went down for the team and Marner in the playoffs, and not with a price tag that's bound to exceed the $10.9 million cap hit on his last contract.

Had Marner led the Leafs on a deep playoff run, maybe even one that ended with a Stanley Cup, a deal like that, like the one William Nylander signed in January (eight years, $92 million) might have been acceptable, even desirable.

It's hard to see it now.

Mitch Marner struggled to make a superstar-calibre impact in the playoffs against the Bruins. (Steve Babineau / NHLI via Getty Images)

The Leafs could let Marner play out the final year of his six-year contract, as they did initially with Nylander. Maybe team president Brendan Shanahan, if he indeed sticks around, convinces new MLSE president Keith Pelley that he and the team deserve one more shot after playing chunks of the 2023 playoffs without Nylander and Auston Matthews.

The organization could conceivably see how the 2024 playoffs play out before they decide to commit to Marner.

They might also have no choice in the matter: Marner could simply decide he's unwilling to waive his no-movement clause, and that could be that. Marner could walk himself to UFA status next summer.

The other possibility? A trade.

What kind of trade is the question. Where would Marner even accept a trade to, if he accepts a trade at all? And what would the Leafs look to fetch in return?

Shanahan, for one, isn't a huge fan of the kind of trades that see a star player shipped out for a bunch of assets. Quantity over quality. Which makes it more likely, perhaps (?), that the Leafs seek at least one sure thing in a Marner trade.

Ideally for the Leafs, that player is a) around the same age as Marner, to fit with the timeline of Matthews (who turns 27 in September) and Nylander (28); b) under contract (or controllable as a future RFA); and c) a difference maker of some kind.

The Leafs could also attempt to pull off the kind of multifaceted trade GM Brad Treliving once made in Calgary, one that turned Dougie Hamilton into Noah Hanifin and Elias Lindholm. But those are hard to pull off.

This won't be an easy trade to make regardless of the structure, not with Marner and his agent, Darren Ferris, playing a role in the process and not with a potentially limited pool of teams (teams that Marner wants to go to and teams that want to trade for and extend Marner) involved.

The Leafs would have had much more flexibility to execute a Marner trade last summer before the no-trade clause in his contract (which still had two seasons left on it) kicked in. They might have even done it had then-GM Kyle Dubas stuck around.

The timing for such a trade felt right then. It still feels right today, if only because this whole core experiment hasn't worked and Marner has felt more and more like the likeliest odd man out.

There have been hints of growth from Marner over the years, but this season, more than others, was riddled with the kind of moments that drove home why playing at home might not be right for him, not anymore.

After the Leafs lost for the fourth straight time in Edmonton in mid-January, Marner said he thought the team had played a "great game again."

"All these games we've been playing, we've played some really good hockey," he said.

Marner believed things would turn around, "Because we're a great hockey team. And we gotta ignore what everyone else says. We know we're a great hockey team. We show it every night."

No, frustration hadn't seeped in, Marner went on, "but I think a lot of people on the outside are trying to do that. It's how it goes."

Marner's comments caused a stir back home. The Leafs had lost four in a row but were playing … "great"? The reaction made its way to Marner. A brief media blackout ensued in the days that followed.

Not even two weeks later, Marner was asked for his thoughts on Ilya Samsonov's redemptive arc following a win over Winnipeg.

Team officials were alarmed by his response.

"I've been in those moments as well, and it's not fun," he said of Samsonov's struggles. "Everyone's against you, really. And everyone is coming at you at all different angles and thinking you're not good enough."

Was that how he felt about playing in Toronto? And if so, why? And what could the team do about it, to make him feel less under siege?

Criticism seems to touch Marner in a way it doesn't with Matthews or Nylander.

Hours before the Leafs played in Chicago in late November, Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe said what was plainly obvious at the time, that Marner wasn't "executing at the level that you'd expect from Mitch," and hadn't "found his groove here yet."

Keefe walked back those comments immediately after the game, as he did when Marner bristled the previous fall when Keefe called out the team's "elite players" after a loss to Arizona.

Marner smashed his stick in frustration when he was benched for a shift that same month in Anaheim and chucked his gloves to the ground in frustration during an argument with Nylander on the bench this spring against the Bruins.

The apparent roots of his feelings of beleaguerment: the contract dispute in 2019 that led to his missing the first day of Leafs training camp in Newfoundland as he and his agent sought a contract in line with the five-year deal that Matthews had signed earlier in the year.

Marner eventually won a six-year contract from the Leafs, with a $10.9 million cap hit that suddenly placed him among the highest-paid players in the league.

Scrutiny and criticism of Marner immediately intensified. He was still only 22, still just a kid, but expectations had skyrocketed — and he seemed to feel it. Then came a 2020 postseason, after a pandemic-disrupted regular season, in which Marner failed to score and produced only four assists in a disconcerting five-game loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets.

Marner didn't score again as the Leafs unraveled against Montreal in a seven-game series loss in 2021.

Playing with apparent freedom and joy in that 2018 series against Boston, Marner's postseason play had morphed into something stiffer and stilted. He simply didn't produce enough when the Leafs needed him most. And for the Leafs, top-heavy as they come, that was essential.