Fire Keefe. He's lost the room. Trotz is available and has a desire to coach an original six team. Knows how to coach an underperforming offensive powerhouse (ex. Washington) to play smarter winning hockey.
Dubas - has built elite teams again and again on paper that come so close, yet so far. The odds of the teams he has built flopping like they have have to be so low. He's done a good job even if the results haven't shown it yet, at least give him until the year's end.
The core is elite, trade Marner? You're not going to win that trade. Trade Matthews? Same. Nylander? Has been arguably the best player on the team.
Break up Matthews and Marner. Maybe you give AM - WN and JT - MM a try, or maybe you go HBK style line and try Matthews with some combo of Kerf/Bunting/Jarnkrok/etc and give Marner his own third line, since JT - Willy is clicking right now. Idk. But it needs to be broken up, at least for a while.
Change is needed, but let's not get too carried away here. Fire the coach, add another goalie if it looks like Murray is out way long term, and add another defenceman. At the deadline, if Muzzin/Murray hurt and there's still some cap space left, maybe add another forward too.
This team can turn it around, but Keefe has lost the room. A few minors tweaks outside of that would be nice, but trade Marner? Stop it.
Under the proposed lineup, the stars would all play fewer minutes. Roughly 14 mins 5v5 for each of the top 3 lines, 8 mins for the 4th line. Then assume roughly 5 mins PP time and 5 mins PK time, PK going to the 4th liners and Jarnkrok (no Marner on PK to conserve more properly), 3.5mins PP to the top guys, 1.5mins PP to the second unit. Very balanced attack, any top 3 line is a major threat, and the 4th line is a shutdown line.
Means the core 4 play 17-18 mins a night, bringing them down quite a bit. Obviously they'd probably get a little more as this estimate wouldn't include putting them out when you need a goal, a shutdown, etc, so more 17.5 - 19 mins ish, but still controls it more.
Next man up into the lineup later in the season would be Knies for any top 3 line, bottom line would be NAK.
Garland has been one of my favourite targets for a while, bring it on. Also, I love Trotz, but is he necessarily the answer? Its been reported that he wants to transition into being a GM, which would make him an ideal fit for TOR for this year alone. I could foresee Trotz coaching this season and then perhaps he moves into the role of GM with Toronto assuming Dubas isnt extended. If that were to occur, whose our coach next year? That much turnover is tough on the players
We wouldn't trade Matt Roy unless a 2023 first was involved. And when we have Alex Turcotte, Tyler Madden, Francesco Pinelli and Sam Helenius in the system, why in the world would we want Fraser Minten to be a significant element of that deal, or any deal?
We would be interested in trading you Sean Durzi or Sean Walker or Jordan Spence for Kaiden Guhle or Jordan Harris, but you're not Montreal.