The Toronto Maple Leafs are an absolute disaster.Now is the time to panic.
The 2023-2024 season is off to a terrible start.
The summer promotion of the Toronto Maple Leafs is flashing in their face and from the general manager to the superstars and coaches, there is nothing wrong with that.
Aside from William Nylander playing at the best level of his career, the rest of the team is playing below expectations because the roster is so unbalanced and the blue line is garbage.
Last night’s game against LA was a disgusting performance from a so called rivalry.
So far, the Leafs are 5-3-1.
But take away two very successful two-goal, two-steal games from Joseph Wall and you’re looking at a team that could go 1-7-1.
That doesn’t look good.
Toronto Maple Leafs: Panic time
To a man, all of Brad Treliving’s summer signings have been poor.
At best, Bertuzzi has decent peripheral numbers, but no real product.
He continues to play Kalle Jarnkrok in the first row. Auston Matthews has been largely overlooked since suffering the injury.
The Knies-Kampf-Domi line is the worst combination of players in NHL history. The Leafs would waste Knies’ talent on the third line with both players facing off.
And the fourth line had an expected goal percentage of 0% last night. Ryan Reaves is the worst player to play a regular role for the Leafs since their competitive debut, and signing him to a three-year deal was one of the dumbest moves in franchise history.
For most of its 100-year lifespan.
No, not early.
Yes, it’s time to panic.
If Shanahan had been brave, he would have let Trelwing go because he made a bad choice.
But that never happens.
Treliving might fire Keefe, but it also makes Keefe look like an idiot.
So what’s left?
Does panic trading occur at the worst time of the year when there are no significant trades?
Do you really want the guy who signed Max Domi, John Klingberg and Ryan Reaves to be traded?
It’s an absolute disaster.
The new general manager seems incompetent.
There are two teams in the 32-team league that have his fingerprints on them, and both look terrible.
Coaching is terrible, the squad lacks depth, and the GM seems to have assembled a Frankenstein’s number of misfits, so they can’t even put together a reasonable lineup.
The bottom six cannot score and are regularly eliminated.
To make matters worse, two of the three goals they have scored this year have come from people who should have been promoted.
If your team loses when the 3rd and 4th lines are deployed, you can’t consistently win hockey games.
What was the worst outfit you saw yesterday?
Ryan Reaves appears as an NHL player.
You can’t win with an unreliable goaltender and a rookie goalie playing behind the worst blue line in the league.
This blue line is too old, too slow, lacks upside and has at least three players who shouldn’t be playing in the NHL today.
Whatever the case, let’s be clear that all of this could have been easily predicted from the start. But no one wanted to listen to him because they wanted to give the new CEO a chance.
Even though everything he did was clearly stupid from day one.
