Should Burke Be Accountable For This?

Wait hold on, I thought we could handle a rebuild? We’re the fans that have spent time saying “rebuild the Leafs, we’ll suffer if it means we’ll be better in the future”. So why is everyone losing their mind right now? Did anyone really think we’d do anything more than maybe squeak into the playoffs if we played our cards right?

I know people are upset about the Kessel deal, I think the timing might be wrong personally, but Burke understands what he gave up. If Burke thinks Kessel is a better player than Taylor Hall and whoever we could draft next year then the deal makes sense period.

THANK YOU!

Patience is something the majority of Leaf fans have never experienced. Everyone wants quick fixes and instant gratification. Sometimes people just need to step back and look at things logically, but sadly when the mob screams and whines, we are forced to listen.

You can’t can a GM for one bad season. These moves take a long time to develop. Evaluating bringing in Kessel or shipping out Tlusty can’t be done objectively for years. If Burke got fired now and another GM came in do you fire him in a year when the Leafs aren’t in the playoffs? Do you keep firing GMs every year until one stiff gets lucky and his three or four predecessors made good moves that benefit the new guy? This doesn’t make any sense.

Bottom line is this is a rebuilding team. This team is going to be horrible. Next year’s team is going to be horrible. Our GM is grabbing the pieces that he wants and waiting to grab the pieces that he needs. Let’s have a little patience Leafs Nation, as we’ve all learned if your team doesn’t win the Cup the season was an unmitigated disaster. We weren’t going to win the Cup this year under any circumstances and that’s true for next year too. This is what cheering for a rebuilding team looks like. Relax.

Hooray for rational opinions!

/cheers

Yeah the timing for the Kessel was atrocious, it came right after Leafs management started preaching “rebuild” and “we’re done trading draft picks” after having done so for so many years, and then BAMO they turned around and did it again.

Of course, only time will tell whether this deal was good or not, but until then, some of us fans will still bitch about it because its still the opposite of what they said they’ll do and it just gives more ammo for the “Maple Laff”-haters out there to mock us.

He should absolutely be held accountable.

That doesn’t mean “fired”, of course. I hope nobody’s seriously arguing for that.

But this is his team. Not 100% his team, but he’s had more than enough time to put a big stamp on it. And they suck. They’re worse than they were under JFJ right now. That falls at Burke’s feet.

The whole “be patient for the rebuild” argument is nice, but it got turned on its head the day Burke decided to start trading away first rounders. Having your own first rounder is a pretty crucial part of the whole “be patient” thing, and we don’t.

Burke still has time to fix this, and there’s still time for some of questionable moves to work out. Even in some sort of crazy worst-case scenario he still has a few years.

But is he accountable? Of course. He’s the highest paid GM in the league. The buck stops with him.

I did have some expectation the Leafs would be better than they have been.

But I expected the team to be just at a garden variety level of suck, instead of the epic fail suck they are at now. At the end of the day I guess there’s not much difference. Even if every break went the Leafs’ way and the whole group was wildly successful, the ceiling for this team is sneak in the playoffs and get roasted by a really good team. That’s still a bad season by any stretch.

It doesn’t feel good, but you have to take your medicine in cases like this. Let’s hope the payoff comes in a couple years as we think it will.

Obviously you don’t can a GM for one bad season.

But if you hired a guy to build you a house, and went around to the construction site after one month and saw that he was building the foundations out of old newspapers, what would you say?

Would you say, well I knew he wouldn’t have a finished house after only a month, so I’ll give him a chance? Or would you say, hey that’s never gonna work. You can’t build a house out of rolled up newspapers.

All the additions this year are questionable. The Monster isn’t adjusting to the NHL, and we now know why Bozak and Hanson weren’t drafted, Beachemin and Komisarek can only play next to a good defenceman (Niedermayer or Markov), which you don’t have.

The Bruins didn’t want Kessel, even though they could have had him without giving up any draft picks, and Wilson now understands why.

Truculence isn’t a desirable quality in life. Burke has built a team only Mike Milbury could love.

The two biggest long-term decisions Brian Burke made since he’s been in Toronto were:
- trading first round picks for Phil Kessel
- not trading Tomas Kaberle

You could argue either of these decisions. Both could certainly turn out to be the right ones in the long run.

But they both have something in common: they were based largely on Burke’s evaluation that this team could be a playoff contender. That’s what made parting with the picks a reasonable price, and that’s what made keeping Kaberle for now instead of dealing him for the future a smart move.

If the Leafs are going to be a last place team, trading two first rounders is probably a disaster. And if they’re going to be a last place team, keeping Kaberle instead of moving him when his value is high is absolutely a disaster.

Playoff contender? Or last place team? That was Burke’s call, and he made it. It looks like he was wrong. It looks like he wasn’t even close.

And that’s on him, and nobody else.

Plain and simple, we overachieved last year.

That team was gawd-awful, only so many forwards had career years offensively, and then Gerber played his best hockey of his last 3 years that we ended up better than we should be. If the team had have been Colorado terrible last season, the Kessel trade never happens because Burke realizes we’re guaranteed to be giving up two lottery picks.

The offseason signings, the development of young players like Stajan, White, Mitchell and GRabovski last season and the cap flexibility this season made Burke believe the Kessel trade was worth the risk. (And I still prefer two 1sts and a 2nd to Kaberle and a 1st for Kessel).

DGB’s correct that Burke deserves blame for misreading the team’s position, but doesn’t deserve to be fired. He does need to clearly identify what his next step is before the trade deadline.
WIlson deserves blame because his players can’t seem to do things they should have learned in PeeWee, like kill a penalty or move to open space on a powerplay.
The players deserve blame for the aforementioned inability to do things PeeWee players know how to do.

I’m going to watch him and the Knights play Friday night here against the Front’s.

What are the rules about him playing those 9 games in the NHL? Once the Leafs are inevitably eliminated from the playoffs, I say bring him up and let him get some experience.

I would argue that this isn’t yet Brian Burke’s team. I took a quick look at the current roster and I counted only 9 players that he signed (maybe 10); which is easily less than half of the team. JFJ and Fletcher have built most of this team (Finger, Blake, Toskala, etc…).

Burke came in with the promise that things would change. That is, after all, the impetus for firing the old GM.

And then he went and signed a couple of expensive, underwhelming UFAs and traded away two first rounders. The Leafs are once again a mediocre team playing the blame game with various pieces, and the fans are looking at the exact same thing they’ve been looking at for 4 years.

Burke saw an average team and thought he could take gambles in order to propel it into success. He’s failed, and he was wrong. Those two facts are pretty inescapable, no matter how they might be cushioned with intentions and hindsight.

He’s done a terrible job thus far if you want to evaluate where the team was when he came on and where it is now. He looked at a team that had been mismanaged with win-now solutions, and then he repeated those mistakes. That decision making process rests entirely on him.

We can talk about how “it all might work out anyway” but we were saying it in the JFJ era too.

A lot of people suggested the Leafs would have trouble scoring this year, which was typically brushed aside by pointing to offensive success from last season. As clrkaitkin pointed out, the Leafs overachieved offensively last season – it was very surprising to me that they were able to do just as well without Sundin, and I think it was a fluke. I don’t know why (luck? new coach effect? lack of pressure to succeed?)

That said, I think they’re clearly underachieving this year. Burke improved the defence (although not the goaltending – clearly should have kept Grbrsrkr) and improved the youth, but the pucks aren’t going in at all, and I think in that regard they’ve been unlucky. I also wonder if the Kessel trade (sorry PPP) made the players themselves feel pressured to win, and they’re not responding well.

I don’t blame Burke – I think we all just underestimated how far this team has to go. The core of the team this year was always going to be JFJ/Fletcher players – those are the veterans – and they still just aren’t that good.