Saturday's FTB: Pithy headline goes here

I spent some time yesterday looking at some things we wrote about the Leafs in the past, and there were some recurring themes that didn't seem to change with the changing men in suits.

Sometimes those Leafs teams were really good, and I don't just believe, I think it's objectively true that "but the playoffs, though" is a cheap and inaccurate summation of many years of very different experiences. It's so tempting though isn't it, to just distill it all down to a good line.

I had one the other night in a game day thread where I was talking about Brad Treliving's hiring of Craig Berube. I'll do this in longer form now to flesh it out more.

I disagreed with anyone who thought the Leafs under Sheldon Keefe were fine, and it was all wonderful. I think there were some real playoff problems, and also some really close calls on series that could have gone either way. I thought they, and by they I mean that famous core four (who were actually five people and then six once Matt Knies came along) needed some fine tuning and a better philosophy of defending as well as defencemen who better suited the skills of the forwards and Morgan Rielly.

I thought they also needed some cultural and identity changes. Yes, I am also tired of those words being used for "the correct performance of masculinity" but let's use them today for what they mean in the sense of how the group views themselves and their relationships to each other and how the individuals see themselves.

Because sports are a performance, that is absolutely about affect in many ways. It's also about how you choose to use your skills and how you do things to instill things like trust and confidence in the rest of the group. It's not big man go brrr hit guy. But it often needs to look quite a bit like that given the nature of the game.

When Brad Treliving hired Craig Berube I thought he'd found a coach who really, really understands how it's all supposed to look, but who doesn't know how to make it look like confident, aggressive, physical, tough and exciting hockey that wins. Treliving went for affect over effect. That was my super clever line.

Treliving is not just one simple distillation of a single personality trait. He isn't just someone who can't tell the difference between a and e. He signed Chris Tanev who acts like and is exactly what the Leafs needed. He signed Ryan Reaves who is a caricature of the kind of commitment to the game the team needed. He extended Max Domi because he mistook a vigorously executed single season for the true nature of the player. He got Nic Roy who I don't think he should have traded, and who is quietly very good at what the Leafs needed. He signed Steven Lorentz who is the fourth-line version of the perfect player for the team. He got the right goalie in Anthony Stolarz, and he got a puck moving nasty and sometimes dirty defender in OEL.

Say you need a blue shirt. You send a guy to the store to get you one, and he gets there and says, "Blue, gotta be blue." Chances are some of what he comes home with will be shirts. But make no mistake, the shirt needed to be blue. Maybe Treliving got lucky sometimes, or maybe he was only wrong sometimes. Doesn't really matter now.

Now here's another clever line:

When Brad Treliving took over the Toronto Maple Leafs, the organization had come to a fork in the road, and he tried to go straight.

I read that line and I admire it, but I think it's not quite right. And it's not exactly what this article says, which is very good, and should be read by all.

I have some quibbles with the "made for the standard Leafs fan audience" examples of problems: Craig Berube getting on team Willy early on, for example. I actually do think it's okay to have a guy like that have his own rules.

I don't quite understand this chorus of disapproval about Scott Laughton and Berube being mean to him by not playing him more. More than who? Nic Roy? I wouldn't! The Flyers did not think he was a 3C. I don't think he's a 3C. I watched him a little bit in LA, where he plays more, and yup, there's those passes into traffic in the slot that get turned over. Scotty is here.

But when Bourne says the roster that Treliving assembled doesn't really look like a roster that can play Berube's game and that Berube's game is not one that the important players on the team are inclined to... well, yeah, no shit.

I don't see this as a conflict per se between the coach and the GM, I see it as a GM who really didn't understand his coach at all. Bourne puts it as trying to have it both ways – the skill and the grit, in other words. But you do need both! The shirt has to be blue. The blue thing has to be a shirt.

And I'll say the quiet part out loud here. Auston Matthews never bought in on Berube's game. It wasn't Mitch Marner Berube needed to meet in the diner, it was Matthews, and Marner can totally play Berube's game if asked. You're going to have to put up with the indignity of him collecting the puck in the offensive zone and starting the cycle again, but he'll play north-south. Nylander can play his game too, as long as heading north means a rush game.

Matthews doesn't. He's not fast enough for a rush game, which no one ever seems to want to mention. He's not going to hit the puck off the opposition in the defensive zone – he hit so much less under Berube, a cynic might think it wasn't just his injury season. He stopped successfully taking pucks away as well. He used to be a star at that, and now he's just good. He's a creative offensive play who is deceptive at everything, not just shooting. You can't deceptively dump it in, though.

And that was totally not the problem. It wasn't. For years everyone has been saying this about the team. Depth scoring! Defence scoring! Goalie scoring! But the equation has never stopped solving to too many goals against. Until last year when the goalies produced rabbits out of hats, and it looked plausible.

I don't actually buy the idea that Treliving is so dumb he thought that was real. I think Treliving was hoping for some rabbits this year until he could add a couple of more players. There were no rabbits.

But again, I think Bourne is around the neighbourhood of some of what is wrong with the Leafs in ideological terms. And it is culture, it is identity. It is partly affect, it's a tonne of lacking effect, and it's the defending.

There is no outlet pass maker and receiver in the right places. How that keeps happening is a multi-faceted problem that must be solved. But right now they can defend better, but they can't stop defending.

I do think what Treliving did at the trade deadline was neither one thing nor the other. He traded players for the sake of doing things. He traded the wrong one in Roy for the only even mildly interesting return. He didn't move out any of the players they likely don't want to keep. He made no decisions about arbitration-eligible players other than he either pays them or lets them walk. Can kicked down the road.

The team still can't play Berube's game and Berube can't coach this team, and it does feel, like Bourne said, as if it's fear of commitment to any one direction that's behind all of this. Maybe it's not just Treliving trying to have his cake and eat it too. Maybe it's all of management.

And here we are today, off to play the Blues. A team that looks as confusingly managed as the Leafs right now.

I agree with Bourne. They need to pick something as their core identity. Plant the flag and live up to it. Whatever it is.

Now that's all the heavy post mortem stuff that we all seem to need to get off our chests now. Maybe because we're hoping for some signs of the future direction soon.

But this is also the Leafs, and it's a reminder that these guys are good people, they have fun, they make their families proud.