This is why Toronto needs that 2nd NHL team. The presence of an alternative team to root for in the greater Toronto region would put serious pressure on the Leafs, since something can now suck half or more of their fandom and revenue away.
There were three attempts to have one that were made by Jim Balsillie, the most viable and most recent of which was to have the Phoenix Coyotes relocated to Hamilton. It was rejected by NHL commissioner Gary Bettman ostensibly and at least partially due to pressure from the MLSE (Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment organization) who really didn’t like the idea of having their lucrative money-making monopoly disrupted by another nearby hockey club.
I’ve never really bought this argument. The Leafs are not coasting along on their existing fanbase, avoiding expenses to maximize profits. They spend to the cap every year, and they probably spend more on coaching, scouting and player health than any other team. And it’s not like they’re bad - they’ve made the playoffs every year since 2016, and do very well… in the regular season. And sure they make an ungodly amount of money…but a Stanley cup would make them even more than that. No, I put this squarely on the core. They’ve had multiple GM’s, coaches, supporting casts…but they’re just chokers. Time to fire Shanahan and trade some major pieces.
Yeah, this sounds to my ears like the argument that “Jerry Jones doesn’t want the Cowboys to win, he just wants money.” Winning = more money. There’s no way any team ownership doesn’t want their team to win. The Leafs may be soft and cave in easily, but given the choice, no Leafs owner is deliberately opting for losing, or thinks failure to advance to the conference finals in 59 years is a good thing.
I’m still here.
More playoff revenue, which is hugely lucrative.
The Leafs front office clearly does make an effort to win games, or else they’d or else they would spend the minimum allowed and not even make the playoffs.
They’ve been in the conference finals four times.
Heheh, yeah, I think Leafs fans sound a LOT like Cowboys fans. If they don’t win the whole enchilada, they’re a failure. Money, practice and some luck will get you to the playoffs. If you’re really good and lucky, you get home ice advantage. It takes a lot of luck to advance past the first round, and even more to make the conference finals.
The Leafs got pretty far, they made it to the second round and ran their series against the current cup holders to seven games. The Panthers were lucky to get the first goal in the game, and that team knows how to stand on a lead. Pulling your goalie early in a 5-1 losing game seven is a no-brainer. You might get back in the game if you can whittle down their lead. You’re certainly not in it at the moment, and losing by 5 is no worse than losing by 4.
Yeah, no. I’m not a Leafs fan, I’m a Habs fan, but these Leafs are disappointing on a historic level. In the 9 years they’ve made the playoffs, they’ve made it to the second round twice. To put that in perspective, the Joe Thornton Sharks, a team most famous for playoff futility, won 14 playoff series in 13 years. They’ve lost 7 straight game sevens, an NHL record, often by blowing leads both in the series and in the game. In this game seven they tied the record for the worst ass-beating in a game 7 in NHL history for a home team. I really can’t think of a team that does as well as they do in the regular season, only to be so disappointing in the playoffs.
What in the world are you talking about? The Panthers had the first 21 shot attempts of the game. The Leafs were lucky it wasn’t 2-0 in the first 5 minutes.
Welcome back after two years! Are you like my Leafs fans at work – sort of relieved to have their lives back?
Anyway, it must be spring…the Leafs are out!
Hey, the Leafs lost 6-1 in game 5 and came back with a great performance in game 6. I’m sure they’ll play well in game 8…
Seriously, Marner has to be gone. The Leafs can’t re-sign him. If I were Matthews, I’d ask for a trade out of town. They gave him the ‘C’ and while he’s a great player, possibly injured, he is not a leader. And how fast is time running out on Shanahan?
This is the thing. If the Leafs didn’t care about trying to build a winning team, they wouldn’t look like this. They’d look like the Flyers, who just sort of stumble along season to season, or the Sabres, a historically terrible team whose string of seasons missing the playoffs is statistically amazing.
The Leafs are a specific kind of failure, a team that is constructed with the skill to do really well in the regular season but without the mix of players needed for playoff success. Beating Ottawa, a young team with no playoff experience and by any measure a way, way inferior team, wasn’t really much of an accomplishment; it was easily the weakest team Toronto has faced in a playoff series in this era of the team. And Ottawa gave them some trouble.
Balsillie’s first idea was to move them to Kitchener-Waterloo, where he and Blackberry/RIM were. In retrospect, it might have been a good thing he failed had he gotten that to work. Had he moved them to Hamilton they’d be in a better situation, albeit, by now, likely without him.
The main problem with it wasn’t so much MLSE as it was Jim Balsillie. He tried to bully and bullshit his way into the NHL, and the NHL doesn’t like that. They want the owners to be a united front. All North American sports leagues are like that; the ownership groups playing nice and being a united front is really, really important to them. Balsillie did not want to play along.
I mean, the NHL really didn’t want to move a team to Winnipeg, let’s be honest. That is not a market they were at all interested in. It adds little to the NHL’s reach and it’s a risky market with limited corporate sponsorship and fragile attendance. But the Jets ownership group went about it the right way, got in good with Bettman and the other owners, and offered to solve a huge, bleeding problem for them. And so they got their team.
I’m not saying MLSE didn’t oppose it, but if the right ownership group came along I have zero doubt there is a possibility the world’s biggest hockey market could get another franchise (and let’s be honest, the rivalry would generate muchos pesos, too.)
This is the NHL. You have to be pretty bad to not make the playoffs, though the Leafs manage it from time to time. Of course Leafs management would prefer to win rather than lose games. I’m sure they’d prefer to advance through all the rounds and win the Stanley Cup. But there’s a big difference between preferring that and desperately wanting and needing it. The Leafs may have the only management in sports history that once reassured fans that yes, of course they care about winning. It speaks volumes that they actually had to say that.
Saying that the Leafs haven’t won the cup in 58 years is actually understating the case. When they last won it, there were just six teams in the NHL. Today there is real competition.
The culture of complacency goes way back much further than Shanahan. And the Leafs go through GMs and coaches faster than I can keep track. It’s never made any difference. The current GM has been on the job just two years, the head coach just one year.
This is factually incorrect. The Leafs have had 3 GM’s and 3 head coaches since 2015 - that’s not particularly remarkable. And it also undercuts your point about them being complacent - they wouldn’t be firing guys if they didn’t want to win. You want to see complacent, look at a team like the Clippers, who let Elgin Baylor do a terrible job for 25 years or whatever. This isn’t a Leafs thing, it’s a this particular core of players thing. Those guys have been here for a decade, under multiple GM’s and coaches, they’re the ones who’ve proven they can’t do this no matter who they’re surrounded by.
Awaiting reactions to an impending game 7 in 2026…
Not really. Institutional complacency can run deep and become insidiously entrenched. It’s more than just a GM and a head coach, who may not even be around long enough to become aware of it.
I’m pretty sure that’s been said every year for the last 58 years! 
How many players have been around for a decade? It has to be very few. And even if we take your statement at face value, that takes us back to 2015. Were the Leafs fantastic before then? No, they totally sucked.
- In the 11 years between 2006 and 2016, inclusive, they missed the playoffs 10 times!
- They haven’t made the conference finals in 23 years, and have only been in the conference finals 5 times in the last 58 years, and lost every time.
- They’ve missed the playoffs altogether 21 times in the 58 years since their last Cup win (when there were just 6 teams in the NHL).
Their regular season record has been mixed, but their playoff history has never been very good.
The core of the team has been there for a decade, more or less; Nylander/Matthews/Marner, Tavares for 7 years now. Yes, they sucked before that. They tried to hold on to their competitive early 2000’s team for too long, spent badly to try to make it competitive, then deliberately tanked for years in order to acquire draft capital so they could draft those guys. And sure, they’re previous teams never had the luck or talent or whatever to win, but I don’t remember anyone ever suggesting the Sundin/Tucker/Domi Leafs were choking, or just not trying.
I’m really not sure what your point is anymore. You seem convinced as a matter of faith that they’re not trying to win. That over the course of multiple owners, presidents, general managers, and players they’ve somehow managed to maintain the same culture for 50 years… so what, they should just contract the franchise?
No, the only thing I’m really convinced of is that their track record shows that something is broken in that organization. If you put that together with the fact that they are the wealthiest franchise in the league (or might be second after the New York Rangers, depending on what you measure or who you believe), a constantly sold-out arena and a huge fan base that remains passionately loyal whether they win or lose, it’s not hard to believe that a certain amount of complacency has set in. It’s only a pet theory of mine but it sure seems plausible.
What do I expect them to do? Nothing I can think of, but the best thing for hockey fans would be another NHL team in the GTA. The market is easily big enough to support it, and I bet you’d soon start seeing big changes in the Leafs organization. Maybe they’d even stop gouging fans on ticket prices!
But that’s not true. They don’t manage it from time to time; they make the playoffs pretty much every year. They haven’t missed the playoffs in nine years. If they just randomly made it by chance that would be a truly remarkable run of good fortune. On top of that, for quite a few years now they have EASILY made the playoffs.
The notion this is a “culture of complacency” is without any logic or evidence at all. If we actually look at the team’s roster moves, they have been trying over and over to win for quite a few years now, and the claim it “goes back farther than Shanahan” doesn’t make sense either if we actually look at the team’s efforts, especially immediately prior to the current salary cap era when they were spending way more than almost anyone else. Even under the salary cap era they make moves, pull in deadline acquisitions, fire coaches, and the like.
I hate the Leafs but I’m sorry, the objective facts do not at all support the “complacent, don’t care about winning” story at all - they don’t act complacent. They do not, contrary to another claim, have no reason to want to win - a run to the Finals would be ludicrously profitable both in terms of playoff revenue AND revenue in subsequent years.
And in total fairness, while it’s apparent now they’ll get rid of at least one or two of the so-called Core Four of Matthews, Marner, Tavares and Rielly, that is a decision that can’t have been made too quickly.
The problem is clearly WHAT they are doing. Whether it’s player, coaching staff or both, they have clearly not hit upon a formula that works in the regular season AND playoffs.
And before that, they made the playoffs once in 11 seasons!
Look, I explained my position in the immediately preceding post. The “complacency” bit that you disagree with is just a pet theory. But the facts are as laid out in that post. We seem to be in agreement that something is broken in that organization.
What really annoys me is that their performance is subpar considering all the strong advantages they have that I listed there (guess who has the most expensive tickets in the entire league?) And not only subpar, but full of big letdowns, like the time I took my son to a game to watch them play arch-rivals Ottawa Senators, and the Sens trounced them 7-0. How does that happen to any competent, motivated team? To be fair, we attended many exciting games, too, but it’s some of the bitter letdowns that stick in my mind.