Newsish things first:

This business of openly scratching healthy players because you want to trade them is now firmly NHL SOP.

Rangers’ Panarin to be held out through Olympic break for roster management purposes
Artemi Panarin will not be in the New York Rangers lineup on Wednesday against the New York Islanders for roster management purposes and is not expected to play again before the Olympic break, according to TSN Hockey Insider Chris Johnston.
TSNTSN.ca Staff

I'll be shocked if he makes it to the break as a Ranger.

Canadiens fire goalie coach Raymond
The Montreal Canadiens announced on Wednesday that the team has relieved goalie coach Eric Raymond of his duties.
TSNThe Canadian Press
Flames mailbag: Trade deadline buzz swirling around key players
With just over a month away from the March 6 trade deadline, Pat Steinberg’s latest Flames mailbag has a certain theme to it.
Sportsnet.caPat Steinberg

Dakota Mermis cleared waivers after his LTIR conditioning stint. He can now play over the break on the Marlies. Marshall Rifai gets a chance to ... well, I don't know if he'll play or not.

There will be something posted here later on this week on the trade freeze rules. It's not exactly like the Holiday Roster Freeze.

Okay, and now this stuff:

Maple Leafs should be deadline sellers, but have bigger questions to answer first
Waking up today, back at the bottom, the Toronto Maple Leafs step off the season-long roller-coaster onto a totally different landscape. Justin Bourne has some thoughts as to what has to happen next.
Sportsnet.caJustin Bourne

So first off, this sellers/buyers thing is an artificial construct that simplifies what teams do down to a false dichotomy – that sports talk classic – so everyone can pick a side and shout out their slogan.

No one is buying or selling anything, first of all, and that's not just semantics. Teams trade away a player to clear cap space, to remove term on a player for future flexibility, to get rid of someone they don't want, to get a big return because the deadline makes other GMs more reckless, and likely a bunch of reasons I haven't thought of.

Teams trade for players to fill holes, to take advantage of teams clearing cap space, to get someone of a better fit in age or ability and all sorts of other reasons that aren't "get a rental."

And to be clear, the Leafs weren't in the market for rentals long before the zeitgeist decided they should be "sellers."

We are, as of this afternoon, six days from the start of the trade freeze. When it ends, there are 11 full days leading up to the trade deadline day. In a normal season, these are the dullest days ahead of the deadline, as everyone who has waited this long, waits a little longer to get a little more salary proration bang for their buck. This season, who knows.

But as Justin Bourne talks about (and ignore the headline), whether they make the playoffs or not is not really the question that matters. Let me lay this out how I've been thinking about it, not too differently from Bourne:

So, Craig Berube said something almost true about this homestand, that the Leafs scored enough to win the games. They did that three times. So what if they'd won them? How would you feel? Or what if they go on the roadie and win all four? What then.

Lose five then win four, or win every other one, it makes no difference. The order you do things doesn't matter, but it sure makes fans' brains pop off in differing colours depending on the sequence. If the Leafs win all four, the zeitgeist will dart off in a whole new direction. But that's feelings. And your feelings and mine, or your optimism or your pessimism or hope or whatever you like to call it, don't mean a damn thing.

What the team needs to do, so by team I mean all of the management people. I'm not going to prop up the fiction that everything is one guy making decisions on his own here. The team needs to look at who the players are, what they have shown they can do – play well enough to win against the Avs and badly enough to be an embarrassment against the Avs – and ask what difference if makes if they come 10th, 15th or 20th in the NHL this year.

It doesn't mean a damn thing.

And any of those outcomes is possible because the middle rank of the NHL is big, is full of flawed teams that meet each other over and over and see if their flaws compound or cancel each other out, and someone has to win each game. Anything can happen with those standings.

Again, it does not mean anything. And I don't think that's news to the Leafs.

Yes, you'll see dudes on the radio, people on TV panels, randoms on social media shrieking in tones of high agitation about how the Leafs should trade all these guys, all of them! Clean house! Get rid of the core players. Whoops it wasn't Marner all along, trade guys until you figure out who the guilty are! Like China reorganizing their military.

This is just not going to happen. The core players have full NMCs and just spare me the stories about how they can put the guy on waivers, that'll learn him, and then they can trade him and the team will have no players, but that's fine because the point is to be enraged! We don't need a team for that!

The Leafs actually do need a team, and what they need to do is to decide how to make trades of various kinds and come out better.

Trade Bobby McMann and Max Domi and Brandon Carlo and bundle up those picks, and oh, wait, Matias Maccelli and Nic Roy and Scott Laughton and think of the pile of picks!! Wheee!

And then you need to go find five regular roster NHLers again before next year. Please don't say the word Marlies, please. The Leafs would be looking for lower end guys, that's good, and they can get those guys in free agency, and they also get to pick six times in the fourth round, whooo hoo, and... uh... How is that better?

Last summer was deeply weird, a thing you have to conveniently forget if you want to be mad online that Brad Treliving didn't sign a hot like burning winger to replace Marner. This summer might not be quite so bizarre, but the cap is going up and a lot of teams in that middle group might think they just need one guy and they'll be competitive, and you know, the Leafs can't think like that. I don't see any indication that they do, and no, doomer prophesies don't count.

They also can't decide to rip it all down. Well, sure they could, it would be mostly like Pittsburgh's version though where they were never going to actually trade any of their core but they coasted with crap goaltending to lose bad for a couple of years – and even then they didn't lose that much. But I don't think the organization wants that. I think they want to try a gentler retool, where they make moves in and out to improve where they lack skill and to create the cap space to fit in any actually meaningful free agents should those materialize.

There is no store to buy and sell at. There is no infinite supply of players. You can't make a shopping list and go get them. The Leafs, like every other team can only act within the realm of the possible.

And I don't think it does matter how many games they win or when they do it.

So to specifics:

No they aren't going to:

  • trade the goalies
  • try to ditch Auston Matthews, William Nylander or John Tavares
  • dump every peripheral player with term who can actually add value on the third or fourth line
  • trade all the defencemen you don't like

They might:

  • see what Morgan Rielly thinks of a move, but he's got the full NMC
  • trade Scott Laughton if someone wants to overpay, and the same goes for Bobby McMann
  • look at Nick Robertson's arbitration case and ask if this isn't the time to trade him at his highest value to date
  • trade some of their truly prodigious collection of depth defenders

Now, to be clear, these moves are just asset management stuff, they aren't going to return big shiny returns that will get the team meaningful players for next year. Which is why, if the most unlikely thing happens and they fall down to the bottom 15 and win a lottery, they would trade that first-round pick at the deadline, guaranteed.

This is not a pretty picture. It wasn't last summer, and it wasn't when Dubas left either. And I can name a big handful of you who knew that at the time. And of course, the Leafs know a lot of things we don't. Is Chris Tanev ever playing again? What's really wrong with Matt Knies? Who else needs to miss some considerable time? And they also have noticed the age of some of their key performers like Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Jake McCabe.

Their view of the possible is a lot more clear than mine is.

This is not a task I envy anyone to have to undertake. It's not just so simple, they just need to do this and that and then it will just be fine and if they weren't so stoopid they'd have done this already.

Firing people isn't going to change this reality, either. Although, if you think I'm a fan of the current management and coaching cadre just because I don't rant on about it every five seconds, think again. Brad Treliving was a profoundly ill-considered choice for GM. Brendan Shanahan is not missed by me.

Now, having said that: Set the popcorn bag back down and resign yourself to waiting, because I don't think the Leafs are doing anything dramatic or cathartic or validating to your feelings in the next two weeks (with the big vacation in the middle).

Lou Lamoriello said a decade or so ago that you can't fill one hole by digging one somewhere else, and that's been the story of the Leafs ever since.

We will see where this goes.

Watch the late one tonight or don't, it's up to you.

From The Branches