Saturday's FTB: In the zone and looking for a way out

This is the best, most cogent case I've seen so far for an aggressive set of moves from the Leafs.

Now, bear in mind this is an article timed to this moment, so the idea that the Leafs should extend their list of who they'd like to move out does not actually have to be enacted right now.

If you are predisposed emotionally to want to see a spectacle of punishment trades, this article should give you some arguments that sound less like that and more like a good idea.

Now here's the scary part. This article doesn't believe its own argument.

The premise:

If the Leafs are indeed able to turn it around next year, it’s going to take something so much more than “same guys play better.” It’s going to be because the haul of picks they bring back helped them land a great player or two in trades at the draft, and maybe they make a great UFA signing or two after moving on from a guy like Rielly.

The sales pitch with the nice compliment for the masses to get you onside:

Fans are not too impatient to see the team aim at the future. They’re smart. They would be reinvigorated by a restocking of the cupboard that allowed them to at least be in on bidding wars when good players become available. And, ironically, as they aim to be good enough to keep Auston Matthews happy past this contract, your best bet is being able to show him that you have some future mapped out beyond “Hope everyone plays better next year.”

The conclusion (after a little meander to talk about how stupid it would be to trade Nylander, but they should totally think about it for a defenceman):

The Leafs have almost no draft capital. They’re rolling out four of the same wingers in Domi, Robertson, Maccelli and Cowan, when they actually dress the latter at all. The D-corps badly needs some players who can make plays.

So let's go through all that. The premise is pretty damn sound. I mean, sure if Matt Knies looks like his contract wasn't a mistake and Morgan Rielly suddenly plays well all year, and the goalies don't alternate being weird, the Leafs would likely make the playoffs after a very conservative rearrangement of players. Which isn't progress. They could have done that this year had some key things been different.

Now the sales pitch: "at least be in on bidding wars". Wowee zowie what a rosy outlook that is! Yeah, absolutely sell all the furniture to bid on that one designer sofa you really covet that you still won't be able to get, but hey, you tried! You were in the bidding war.

And the conclusion: Okay, to be honest this article needs a big edit. That's not really a paragraph that says anything, and there really isn't a conclusion after it, just a restatement of the premise.

And that's what I mean when I say this article doesn't believe its own argument. It does not think this cute term of art called being over-sellous will actually work. And trust me, I don't think just hoping for better dice rolls is going to work either.

Bourne makes a valid point that re-signing older UFAs won't make the team better long term. The idea here is that Bobby McMann has given the Leafs his best years, now ditch him like they did Ilya Mikheyev. And if you just pluck that idea out of the full mix of choices confronting the team, that makes sense. And then when July rolls around, you sign a guy McMann's age to play his role.

That's the problem with this entire situation. You can't have your draft picks and the player you traded for those picks both. You aren't getting a middle pairing defender back in a Brandon Carlo trade. Bourne says, and I agree, that Treliving (or any other executive) can't just throw up his hands and say "it's too hard". But it is hard! This is the problem, you can't do that one neat rhetorical trick of confidently offering a simple solution because one does not exist.

So again, I come back to first principles. My first principles: picks are junk, cap space is an asset, defence is cheaper than offence.

I think the only way to get a decent probability of being a legit team in the next two years is to make cap space, and fill it up with the best possible players who are older than you or Justin Bourne wants, more expensive – probably overpaid – and who want to commit to a team that works hard to capitalize on their skill by having the puck most of the time and being the biggest pains in the ass in the defensive zone, the NHL has.

There's no magic pathway to getting younger, not even by trading Oliver Ekman-Larsson and then losing a bidding war on Vladislav Gavrikov. They might get lucky and find another McMann type of player. And that for me is the thing about this ideological choice of "trade lots" or "trade some" that is carefully elided in this pro-lots article: the entire idea is as reliant on the favourable roll of the dice as is the "just play better" concept it casts aside. You cannot just wave your hand and say, oh they'll find guys in trade who are better and younger and faster and cheaper and come on. This is the Costco fallacy used to underpin the whole thing.

Now, straight talk: I don't recognize the caricature that has been created on this site of a big mean old man who yells and hates all the players and benches guys and scratches them for mistakes and will ruin all the prospects and so on and on.

But the other big thing missing from Bourne's premise that "just playing better" isn't enough is that the surest way to have this team play better is to have players who can actually perform defensive and transitional roles but also have a coach who can devise a system that actually includes a, (deep breath so I don't yell), a damn zone exit once in a fucking month of Sundays.

I don't miss Sheldon Keefe. Not even a little bit. The Leafs were easy pickings, even when they were younger and faster and full of the right stereotypes.

I don't miss Kyle Dubas all that much either, although he enacts human values in a sport that – glances at the Wild – could use a few more people who do. He is the author of this current situation as much as Brendan Shanahan and Brad Treliving are. This is a process of years of choices and outcomes foreseeable and not.

But why was Dubas fired? I think he wanted to walk down one fork in the road and Shanahan wanted the straight ahead path, more north-south. And here we are again, needing to formulate a strategy, not just have some good situational tactics on July 1.

The Leafs, one might say, need a zone exit out of the muddy middle. And that is exactly the circumstances where NHL teams traditionally fire the management staff so the next guy can make the changes the first guy failed to sell up the org chart.

Maybe we are there again. But if every new guy given the hard job has to take a year before he really acts, we'll be stuck here forever.

Zone exits. That's all I want.

The news, last I looked, was at "Could the Panthers trade Bobrovsky" level of nothing going on pre-deadline speculation.

It's the weekend, and the Leafs are playing Ottawa. More on that later today.

From The Branches