I love how you used lucic as an example of someone who would 'prevent' players from running the leafs stars when Lucic was like 10 feet away from marv savard when cooke took his head off and he didnt even fight cooke after.
Tough guy Protection is a comfortable lie that don cherry told you to keep away the nightmares, nothing more

LOL maybe he did let Cooke run Savard but the leafs have no toughness right now and its embarrassing watching them get pushed around night after night

Its amazing how when the leafs have bad few games its always 'toughness'. No matter how many orrs, muzzins, simmonds, Clifford's, oomissreks etc etc they have.
Fairy tails. Just say you like hitz and leave out the fake narratives. Toughness has never been an issue for the leafs

Wrong, size matters, and Cup winning teams prove that.
They are tiny on the backend and that will not take them anywhere. Don't have to fight but must be hard to play against.
Clifford, Simmonds, and Muzzin are players now that are not relevant. Muzzin is the only one that plays minutes, and he's now past his prime, and plays soft now.

no, that's not true at all. The leafs are a bigger and heavier team than both tampa and colorado. The leafs are a very hard team to play against, that's why it took tampa 7 games to beat them and they only did it on by one goal and needed the refs to call back a leafs goal to do it.
Lybushkin didnt help, Komisarek didnt help, Bogosian, Fraser, O'Byrn, Hainsey, Polak etc etc etc.
Toughness and size has never been an issue because if it was then why did all the toughness and size the leafs add never help? Why were the toughest and biggest teams always the worst?

They have not got past the first round so how is that hard to play against? So what they went 7 games. That's in the first round too.
They would get killed after that anyways.
Your naming all fringe players. Like 4th liners and 6-7 D man a best.
They need a impact D man that is tough to play against. Juts like all the top teams have.

The leafs literally have one of the best defensive lines in the league for several years now and all but kept tampas best players off the score sheet.
They are as tough to play against as almost anyone.
And there are lots of reasons why they didnt make it past the first round but most of those reasons were because they didnt score enough or their goalie imploded.
The defence hasnt been an issue since lou was gm

They did not keep Tampa shut down, Stamkos was playing hurt that round too.
If they shut them down they would have won. Pretty simple is they do not have the make up to make a run. They rely too much on Marner and Matthews to score and if they don't then they are screwed.
They need better D that is harder to play against. In the top 4 they don't have one.