Quoting: Jacketsman61
I don’t know why people are saying Toronto is not going to rebuild…read the tea Leafs…they are going to have a new GM come in only to tell him to win the Cup, keep all of the core, and balance that with the cap the way it is currently without any guarantees that it will go up enough for them to re-sign the core? That is unrealistic. If this was an all in scenario they would have re-signed Dubas. The wording is important as the club decided to part ways with Dubas. Meaning one of two things, either the club is going to hire a GM to rebuild this team by trading high priced players or Shanahan is putting this upcoming season on his head as cup or fired.
Right now would in my opinion be the dumbest point to start a rebuild from Leafs perspective.
Their greatest assets are reaching the ending point of their contracts, meaning that their actual trade value is at its lowest.
The last season they had was the best they've had in 20 years, so at least performance wise they have made progress. The team hasn't regressed one bit. It's a bit of a shame that they ended up facing a team that had such a momentum swing going their way after defeating the team that had the best regular season ever in the second round, they simply couldn't stop it. And thus far it seems like there's no team on earth able to stop them.
I think what that team needs is a wake-up call, and firing the GM that was responsible of building that core is one way to do it. Second one is to replace the coach. And the last one would be trading one of those key guys for some new blood. I wouldn't be too surprised if we see all of these happening, but the ultimate goal is still to compete for the cup the next year. Starting a fire sale type rebuild just isn't in the cards, it makes no sense.
Leafs is in unique position where they have loads of cap space to do plenty of things during offseason. It'll be interesting what route they approach, as for the past two or three years they've been so cap strapped their options have been very much limited. This is not the case this season.