TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS POST MORTEM

I hardly ever talk in a serious way about the Toronto Maple Leafs because they get enough coverage as it is, but in the interests of offering a different take that you won’t get anywhere else, here goes.  The Leafs can look to one person and one person only for their failures:  Brendan Shanahan.  Most will say the Shanahan tenure has been a relative success based on the great regular season records and the massive turnaround from where the team was at the time of his hiring.  However, I would say what Shanahan has done could have been accomplished by just about anyone willing to sit back and do, practically, nothing other than draft top players based on what NHL Central Scouting suggests you do.  Shanahan, in my opinion, excels at one thing and one thing only:  Public Relations. 

Let’s go back to Shanahan The Player.  When he was traded by St. Louis to Hartford for Chris Pronger in 1995, he threw a major temper tantrum and forced his way to Detroit a year later.  Hockey players who do this type of thing, typically, aren’t looked upon favorably but Shanahan was able to do it without tarnishing his reputation.  When the Blues dealt him to Hartford, Shanahan was in the midst of some questionable moral ethics as Craig Janney, his teammate, ended up losing his wife to Shanahan.  When Shanahan retired on November 17, 2009; he was hired by the NHL head office three weeks later with no relative experience.  When he left the NHL, the Toronto Maple Leafs made him their President.  Think about that.  The NHL team with the most money, who can hire anyone on the planet, hired a person with no experience to be in charge of everything.  Clearly, he knows what to say and who to say it to.

Shanahan, when he played in Detroit, had Mike Babcock as a coach.  Babcock, as we know, was fired by Shanahan in 2019 amidst allegations of bullying Mitch Marner in an effort to get him to become a more complete player (the irony of this in 2024 as Marner was basically a non factor in the 2023 loss to Florida and then in this year’s series with Boston). After Babcock was fired, several past players stepped up to say this is how Babcock has always behaved.  If that’s true, Shanahan should have walked the plank right then and there for, knowingly, hiring him in the first place.  After all, Shanahan would have been in the very same dressing room as Johan Franzen, Mike Modano, and Chris Chelios (all of whom have shared Babcock stories).  But, again, Shanahan gets a free pass and I don’t think he fielded a single question about knowing of Babcock’s methods.

It is often said that good leaders will surround themselves with good people.  Weak leaders will surround themselves with weak people.  When Shanahan came aboard, he had an army of General Managers, but he slowly got rid of them all (including Lou Lamoriello and Mark Hunter) and settled on Kyle Dubas, a young and impressionable GM with no NHL experience at the job.  Again, here we have the richest NHL franchise getting rid of their team of highly respected and experienced managers in favor of a young upstart who has none of what Shanahan got rid of.  Shanahan, later, would green light the hire of Dubas’ buddy to replace Babcock in Sheldon Keefe.  Keefe, to his credit, has appeared to have completely reinvented himself but his history as a player and human being was also checkered through his involvement with David Frost.

You also won’t see any revisionist history but when the Leafs picked Mitch Marner 4th overall in the 2015 Draft, the very next pick was defenseman Noah Hanifin.  Hanifin, while not the prolific point getter that Marner is, would be exactly a significant missing piece that the Leafs have long been able to locate to fill their roster.  Ask yourself if the Leafs are better, worse, or no different if you dealt Marner for Hanifin straight up today?  If you are honest and are a Leaf fan, the answer hurts.  It was Shanahan’s second draft while at the helm (he picked Willy Nylander in the first round the previous year). 

Back in 2017-18, the Leafs were in the running as Stanley Cup contenders.  They also had Marner, Auston Matthews, and Nylander on cheap rookie deals.  Those young players were supported by Patrick Marleau to provide leadership and they also had a decent support cast that included the likes of James Van Riemsdyk, Zach Hyman, Nazem Kadri, and then the blueline featured a young Morgan Rielly, Jake Gardiner, and another veteran who was a good dressing room influence in Ron Hainsey.  The so-called big fish at the trade deadline was Ryan McDonagh, precisely the type of defenseman missing from the equation.  Shanahan, who was a big promoter of slow playing the way to contention, didn’t want to take advantage of his top players all being on cheap deals, and so he passed up on McDonagh and he would go on to be key in helping the Tampa Bay Lightning win the Stanley Cup.  

The following offseason, Shanahan opened the vault for John Tavares to join a team that didn’t need him.  There’s only so many players you can put on the ice at once and while Tavares has taken his fair share of criticism over the years the reality is that this was always a poor fit.  Something both Tavares and the Leafs should have recognized and walked away from before signing a long term contract.  In a salary cap world, it also handcuffed the Leafs to investing 50% of their payroll (once Marner and Nylander also re-upped) to a small fraction of the roster.  There was no wiggle room to make any significant additions to plug holes.  Whether you blame Dubas or Shanahan for that doesn’t matter.  It was Shanahan who hired the inexperienced Dubas (who paid everybody that asked to be paid).

When Dubas left the Leafs prior to this season, we learned a little bit about his questionable character too so why are we so stunned that the players seem to be acting childish at times?

As we sit here at the end of 2024 and the Leafs have dropped eight of nine playoff series’ during the Shanahan tenure there appears to be a lot of head scratching and accusations the Leafs’ top players aren’t tough enough or are too soft to succeed in the playoffs. To that end, I would say they simply take on the complexion of their President.  Which is to say accountability and intestinal fortitude aren’t going to be their strengths.  What about Shanahan in Detroit, you may ask? He built a reputation as maybe the top power forward of his era.  Well, I wonder how that would have turned out if not for Steve Yzerman leading their dressing room and was he really what his reputation says he was or was that just more of Shanahan being able to win over everybody with this salesman like personality and the media never ever criticized him?

The other thing that fans and NHL owners who want to win should be aware of going forward is that any coach or manager who promotes slow playing a team’s way to contention is only out for one thing - himself.  The slow play will buy long term job security and nothing else.  Shanahan knew this all along and while the Leafs players and fans are big losers for having certain expectations that have consistently fallen short, Shanahan is the big winner.  He’s been in a cushy, well paid job for 10 years and has, seldom, had to answer a tough question.  He’s likely to be there for quite some time yet as he gets set to sell another Shanaplan to a group of superiors who are easily influenced and ready to pin the blame on Mitch Marner and John Tavares.