Something’s Over In Toronto

Everything you need to know about the last decade of Maple Leafs hockey can be found in the Panthers' third and backbreaking goal of Florida's Game 7 shitkicking. Toronto was getting outskated, and under fire in a barrage unequaled by any team all year. They had held, until they hadn't: two goals four minutes apart had stunned the building into a queasy silence. The next one felt like the decider for this game—and this series, this season, this era. A Leafs goal would put them right back in it; a Cats tally the bursting of floodgates. The deluge did not let up, Florida's relentless forecheck making it an ordeal to simply exit one's own zone.

John Tavares, who was the expensive but inevitable "final piece" seven long years ago, handed off the "C" before this season, and is now officially back on the market, was harassed by a pair of Panthers as he tried to bring the puck out. A sloppy and precarious pass along the boards was swiped by a hustling Seth Jones, who cleverly avoided triggering an offside call until Jonah Gadjovich touched up. Then, doing a U-turn to get back on defense, Morgan Rielly, the blueline representative of Toronto's homegrown core four, just ... fell down? For no reason?

A totally unmarked Gadjovich finished off the one-timer as Rielly desperately tried to skate back into the play. Expensive, lopsided, talented, futile, totally outplayed in crunch time, and yet still slightly inexplicable in its failure—that's the Maple Leafs, all right.

This is now nine straight playoffs appearances since the Shanaplan started to bear fruit, with a total of two series wins—and an 0-7 record in winner-take-all games. It was an era easily and not inaccurately described by the broadest of outlines: a top-heavy roster, constrained from doing anything year-to-year other than "run it back" by the money and years they committed to their best players, who excelled in the regular season and shrank in the postseason. The Leafs haven't won any Games 7 because their stars have been invisible, but also because they don't have their own Lundells, Luostarinens, or Gadjoviches to pick up the slack. Brendan Shanahan's departure of developing young stars rather than overpaying old ones was ultimately defeated by its own mixed success—it drafted and created players too good to be able to afford to sign a serious supporting cast, but not quite good enough to get over the hump. A ceiling of early playoff exits is a particularly painful variety of limbo.

At last, though, Running It Back is no longer an option in Toronto. When they insist this team is Different now, it actually will be. Mitch Marner is a free agent, and seems to have no interest in a reunion, and the Leafs no interest in offering him what he can get elsewhere. Tavares said he wants to be back, but we'll see. Between them, that's $22 million coming off the books, and the cap itself is shooting up more than $7 million next season. The Leafs have the space to finally add an impact player or three. (Sam Bennett? Nik Ehlers? Brock Boeser?) The irony is that no one they sign is likely to match Marner's production; this is a franchise that might be damned whether it does or doesn't. But if ever a team has needed change for the sake of change, this is it.

The big decision looming is on Shanahan himself, whose contract is also up this summer. The Shanaplan, v1.0 anyway, didn't work, not if the goal is a Cup. Did it work well enough that Shanahan should be the one who now decides where to spend the money to build around Matthews, Nylander, and Rielly, all of whom are signed through or past 2028?

One thing will not change in Toronto, at least: Toronto itself. The fans and their cyclical trauma, the media and its gleeful angst. It is probably not healthy for anyone to be in a situation where making the playoffs kicks off an existential crisis. Brad Marchand, who knows a thing or three about the Leafs and about Games 7, said last night that he thinks whatever ails Leafs skaters is coming from the outside, that fans "beat the pressure" into the players. "How do you not feel that every day?" Marchand asked. Whatever the Leafs do this offseason, whatever they look like next season, there'll still be the same old dragons to slay, and they get bigger and meaner every year.