BOSTON — The call came last summer.
It was from the new general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Brad Treliving, and he had a message for Mitch Marner.
“He made it pretty clear that he wanted to keep our core together,” Marner told The Athletic last fall. “He trusted our core.”
What now for the Leafs and that core after yet another early playoff exit?
“It’s an empty feeling right now,” William Nylander said in what’s become an all too familiar setting for the Leafs, an empty dressing room after a painful playoff loss.
Nylander’s stick, emblazoned with “Willy Styles,” was still standing against a wall in a corner. It wasn’t long after Game 7, and another first-round exit. The mood was dour.
“Look, I don’t think there’s an issue with the core,” Nylander said. “I think we were f—— right there all series battling — battling hard. We got it to Game 7 OT. It’s a s—– feeling.”
Auston Matthews called this particular Leafs team the tightest he’s ever been a part of. “I feel like we say that every year, but it truly was an incredible group, incredibly tight,” he said.
“We’re right there,” John Tavares said. “It’s a very small difference.”
The results are what they are though. The Leafs haven’t gotten close at all. Running it back with this core — Matthews, Marner, Nylander, Tavares, and Morgan Rielly — has not worked.
The Leafs ran it back after they were embarrassed by an inferior Columbus Blue Jackets team in 2020. They ran it back after they allowed a 3-1 series lead to melt away against the Montreal Canadiens, another inferior opponent, in 2021. The Leafs ran it back yet again after they lost in seven games to the Tampa Bay Lightning a year after that. And just when it looked like they would pivot last spring after dropping a five-game second-round series to the Florida Panthers, team president Brendan Shanahan fired then-GM Kyle Dubas and insisted again — with Treliving moving into the GM’s chair — that the core was staying put.
“Just being different doesn’t solve something,” Shanahan said when he announced Dubas’ firing.
And yet, clearly, the status quo didn’t solve anything either. If anything, just the opposite: The Leafs were dispatched again in the first round. Clawing back from a 3-1 series deficit to force Game 7 doesn’t change the fact that running it back one more time backfired.
Is this — finally — the time the Leafs pivot in a major way? And if so, who gets to make that call? And what exactly does it mean?
The question of running it back has to include the member of the core — management division — that never gets mentioned: Shanahan.
