Did the Toronto Maple Leafs just play their worst game of the season?
If it wasn’t the worst, it was in the running. Outshot 16-2 (!) in the first period. Four shots on net halfway through the game (!!). A second period which saw the Ottawa Senators run around and do what they wanted and eventually break things open during the first home game for the Leafs in a month.
It was Toronto’s third straight loss coming out of the Olympic break and third straight display of dejected, dispiriting, flat and admittedly embarrassing hockey.
“Just bad,” captain Auston Matthews said afterward.
Any debate about the trade deadline, and the path the front office may take, was already over. Selling remains the only option. But what does this all mean for the head coach? Is Craig Berube’s future with the Leafs being sealed with the way this thing is unravelling?
The thing is, none of this is particularly new.
This just feels more alarming because it’s March, and the Leafs of the last decade were usually coasting into the playoffs by now and wondering whether they would face the Tampa Bay Lightning, Boston Bruins, Florida Panthers or Senators in the first round.
The Leafs have performed like this plenty this season, though. Sluggish starts, especially at home. Not enough fire. Not enough pushback. Too much time defending. Poor defending. Not enough time with the puck. Not enough time on offence. Too much chasing the game.
The alarm bells were blaring that something was amiss in October, and then in November and right on into December. Berube wasn’t getting through to his team, or he was getting through to his team, but his tactics were failing — or both. That, and a roster that was too old, too slow, with too many limitations (and injuries) in important positions.
Trades are hard. The front office chose not to act with the one move it could make anytime it wanted.
General manager Brad Treliving instead threw his public support behind Berube, twice.
“I want to make it clear: I support Craig fully,” said Treliving, doubling down on Berube after the team fired assistant coach Marc Savard in late December. “It’s not lost on us where the team’s at. We live it every day. But I think we’ve got a real good coach.”
The Savard firing — and subsequent Steve Sullivan replacement — was supposed to help the power play (and it has, in a big way, actually). But the power play was just one problem among many that the head coach was struggling to answer then and has found no lasting solutions for since.
The players have to wear some of this, certainly, especially in troublingly flat losses like the one Saturday, when an inspired response from two bad losses in Florida should have been a given. Ultimately, it’s the job of the head coach to get the team ready to play. But it’s also the job of the players to come ready to play.
“I can’t give guys this or this,” Berube said after the loss to the Senators, pointing to his heart and head. “They have to come with that. That’s gotta be on them. They gotta bring the heart and competitiveness that’s needed.”
Joseph Woll was pulled in the Leafs’ embarrassing Saturday night loss to the Senators. (Dan Hamilton / Imagn Images)
Clearly, though, a lot of this goes beyond heart.
The Leafs are third-last in the league in time spent in the offensive zone at even strength, third-last in puck possession and last in the rate of shots allowed at five-on-five. That’s coaching.
Even during games, Berube isn’t landing on adjustments that inspire change. The Leafs were disturbingly lifeless early against the Senators and nothing happened. There was no putting William Nylander onto Matthews’ wing in hopes of sparking something, no benching, no shake-up, no nothing but a challenge for offside on the fourth Ottawa goal.
The Leafs came out for the second looking exactly as flat as they played most of the first.
A coaching change when the season was still salvageable may not have mattered. The roster may not be good enough to contend no matter who’s behind the bench.
Making a change now feels almost pointless with 22 games left in the season.
Maybe it gives the front office an opportunity to better evaluate how many of the team’s issues were about the strategies and leadership of the head coach as the Maple Leafs head into the offseason — but how much stock could they really put into that evaluation?
What games like this, stretches like this, may do is seal Berube’s fate after the season. This is as ugly as it’s been around the Leafs in a good long while, since the days of Randy Carlyle. It’s going to be hard to justify not making a change behind the bench — and elsewhere — after all this.
Does Keith Pelley, the president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment and a known Berube enthusiast, believe that? The evidence is becoming too hard to ignore.