so brutal for the leafs. wtf??

No, it's really not. Rucizka was 23 last year and has an incredibly valuable toolset as a PWF with size and mobility, who can also provide offense. in 2021-22 he scored 20 points and 11 goals in 16 games in the AHL. He'd be a great fit as a Knies/Hyman type player on Tavares' wing and is super cost controlled. He's more valuable than Liljegren, who struggled to crack our playoff lineup.

Tanev is a top pair D and has been top 5 defensively among D-men for most of his career, he's more valuable than Brodie.

Hanifin is a top pair D. Willy was relegated to the 3rd line in the playoffs. Even if Willy is more valuable apples to apples, I think overall this is a win for the Leafs. Most importantly we save 4 mil in cap this year and probably more long term.

This team is better after that trade.

and brodie hasnt been our top defensive dmen? and lily has way more value than adam to the leafs. nylander alone should get you that package. and thats if the leafs really want to trade for dmens. which is very unlikely

Brodie has been, that's the issue. He was awful in last year's playoffs, either because he's gotten older or because he doesn't have Muzzin as a partner anymore. Not only do we add Tanev, but we add another top pairing D along with him.

And no, Liljegren is not more valuable than Rucizka, especially after this trade. He is a fine defenseman but there is nothing about him that is irreplaceable. I would much rather bet on Timmins who has at least shown high end offensive IQ. Guys like Knies and Hyman should have proven by now how valuable power forwards can be, especially to this team.

ur right brodie doesnt have muzzin, he has mccabe whos muzzin 2.0 but even more mobile. its crazy how you evaluate every player by 1 playoff run. brodie has been our go to guy for years, he was clearly dealing with injuries and he was a big target on dump ins for huge hits. imo hes equal to tanev if not better. phalal is right, leafs fan hate their own so much its unreal

Muzzin 2.0? Are you serious? I actually think he's fine as a 2nd pair guy with a partner who can act as the puck mover for that pairing. The fact is we had to go bargain shopping and he was the best we could get at a 2 mil cap hit. He came from one of the worst rosters in the league having never played a postseason game and we're supposed to be surprised that putting him with a 33 year old Brodie and expecting them to be our shutdown pair ended up in them getting eaten alive by Florida?

Our second best defenseman in the playoffs was 33 year old career bottom pair Luke Schenn, who just walked for nothing. Why do you think Brodie was a target for dump ins and big hits, and how do you not see that as an issue? Your opinion means very little because Tanev has always been objectively better, as good as Brodie has been. Our D in the playoffs was small, slow, lacked offense beyond Rielly and now lacks physicality beyond McCabe. The only defenseman other than Rielly making more than 2 mil was 33 year old Brodie who expires after this year. Gio is the oldest defenseman in the league, Holl walked, I'm not judging this team off one playoff run, I'm judging them on the 7 playoff runs we've had since drafting a generational scorer and the fact we've won a single game in the second round.

If you look at this roster compared to our lineup at this time last year (minus Muzzin whose career ended almost immediately, to no one's surprise), we'd be replacing:

Nylander, Bunting, Malgin?, Engvall, Kerfoot, Aube-Kubel, ZAR, Sandin, Holl, Gio and Brodie

With:

Konecny, Bertuzzi, Domi, Knies, Henrique, Rucizka, Lafferty, Reaves, Klingberg, Hanifin, McCabe and Tanev.

We'd be better offensively, better defensively, bigger, more mobile, more physical, more balanced and better constructed for playoffs. I don't hate our players, I just think there are changes we can make to improve, seems pretty obvious to me at this point...

our blue line is not the reason why we lost. its the lack of scoring lol

It's hilarious that people still can't see how flawed this argument is. In every series defeat we've been the team who invested way more in our forwards. In every series we've been beaten by a better defense, a better goaltender and a simple strategy of collapsing around the net.

Conventional wisdom always says to build from the net out and that you need to be able to win those low scoring games. Here are the amount of goals scored by the losing team in every playoff round from last year:

RD 1: Jets (1), Wild (1), Avalanche (1), Kings (4), Rangers (0), Islanders (1, OTL), Lightning (1), Bruins (3, OTL),

RD 2: Oilers (2), Krakken (1), Devils (2), Leafs (2, OTL)

Conference Final: Stars (0), Canes (3)

Cup FInal: Panthers (3)

That's an average of 1.67 goals, which means on average the winning team would only need to score 2 goals to win.

Why? Because the best teams win those critical games by playing tight checking, mistake free, defense first hockey, waiting for their bounce after the other team makes a mistake first. That's why the last 4 teams to win the cup have had arguably the best D core in the league, or at least top 3. Are the Avalanche, Rangers, Devils and Lightning bad offensively too?

How many goals did we need to win our first playoff series in 19 years? Two, one in OT. We would have only needed one goal if not for an egregious defensive mistake on the Stamkos goal.

How many goals did we need to win our first game in the second round in 19 years? Two.

Who was our playoff MVP, providing offense at the most critical times? Morgan Rielly, because he was our only defenseman who could provide offense from the backend when teams collapsed around the net. But sure, let's just keep adding forwards while our D core and starting goalie result in us posting a sub .900% 2 years in a row, with Rielly and Schenn as the only two defensemen to post a positive goal differential against Florida, and our second highest scoring defenseman throughout the entire postseason posting 3 assist in 11 games.

BUT I DID THE MATH AND IF WE SCORED MORE GOALS THAN THE OTHER TEAM WE WOULD HAVE WON!!

Genius.

EDIT.

How many goals did the leafs score in the first round?
Vs how many did we score in the 2nd?
That’s why we lost. We had 0 offense and couldn’t solve Brobovsky. Simple as that, you can trade an offensive threat for 5 shutdown dmen if you like. It still won’t solve our lack of offensive production

You're proving my point.. they showed they can score plenty of goals against the best goaltender in the world. If you run into a hot goalie you have play mistake free and wait for your bounces. Every game against Florida was a 1 goal game except the 4-2 loss in game one. Jake "Muzzin 2.0" McCabe was on the ice for 6 more GA than GF - the panthers scored 4 more goals than we did to win the series. We controlled most of the play in the series but you can point to egregious mistakes in every game that cost us. We had the better offense, they made fewer mistakes. It's literally been the same thing every year but some people can't seem to grasp that I guess.

If our excessive investment in the forward group hasn't resulted in enough scoring and our goalies have posted back to back years of sub .900%, both of whom we paid as our backups because the goalies we acquired to be our starters didn't play a single playoff game for us and ended up being cap dumps, why would we keep going back to that philosophy when we have nothing but failure to show for it? Matthews, Marner, Tavares, Nylander, ROR etc. can't solve Bobrovsky, or Vasi the year before, or Price, or Korpisalo, but the next 3rd liner we sign will be that difference?

We had to play our 7 million dollar forward Nylander on the 3rd line because he couldn't handle top 6 matchups and needed to be sheltered with offensive zone starts, yet he still got outscored more than any other forward on the team. That means the team was losing when Nylander was on the ice against the other team's 3rd lines, and we're going to pay him close to 10 mil until he's 36?

The strategy to beat the Leafs is pretty simple and has always been the same. Collapse around the net and keep the forwards to the outside. This might leave more space at the point but only Rielly is a threat to provide offense from there anyway. Then just wait until we inevitably make a mistake to create an odd-man rush the other way and bury your chance on a weaker goaltender.

I'm not even talking about shutdown D necessarily, though we definitely need a better shutdown pair than Brodie and McCabe. We also need defenseman who can create offense from the point when our forwards have no space in the offensive zone.

Your whole theory goes against all conventional wisdom and we have nothing but failure to show for it. Guess what? Spending assets to add two D-men to our top 4 at each of the last 2 deadlines, 2 of whom were bottom pairing D making close to league min that we played with our best D man (Lyubushkin and Schenn) and the other 2 who we had to pay extra for to get retention because we couldn't afford them at more than 2 mil (McCabe and Gio), while asking them to play higher in the lineup than they should, and acquiring guys like Mrazek and Murray to be your starters only to have them play zero playoff games before becoming cap dumps, or spending assets on rentals like ROR and Foligno because you're not deep enough at center, all because you invested half your cap in 4 forwards who as you've said haven't been able to give us the scoring we needed to overcome our goals against, HASN'T WORKED. Like, not even ****ing close.

Toronto is supposed to be the Mecca of hockey and our fans should be among the most knowledgeable in the league, but somehow Carolina, Vegas and Tampa fans seem to have figured out the absolute basics before most Leafs fans have.

Also, I've already explained that this roster would be better offensively than last year's as well as being better defensively. That's what can happen when you spread out your cap.

Thankfully Treliving has enough sense to see what needs to be done - take notes.

Leafs nation is biggest fan base in the league. But with numbers come some fans with truly mind boggling assessments of what the team needs. This trade is off the chart ridonculous 🤦🏻but what are you gonna do 🤷🏻

Definitely not

I would thumbs up this post 100 times if I could. You have summed up the issues with Toronto very nicely. In particular you have analyzed why Nylander is one of the most over rated players by some Toronto posters. All they want to talk about is his points, but never want to look at the fact he is on the ice for almost as many goals against, all the while avoiding the other team's top checking lines. I won't even go into detail about how Nylander is not a team player, and doesn't sacrifice, and does not have the play off mentality. And the lack of balance between forwards and the back end is mind boggling, even after multiple years in a row of showing that this balance does not work in the play offs some posters just refuse to acknowledge how the lack of top end defenders are one of the reasons this team continuously fail. I nominate this reply as one of the top entries on this site.

You get it 100%.

Don't worry dude, these guys had their time when Dubas was GM, they're more interested in being right than they are in the Leafs actually being successful. In order for them to be right, they'd have to stay the path and hope by some miracle this obvious pattern changes. They're still grasping onto that even after Dubas showed his true colours and sewered us one last time before heading to Pitt.

Now it's our time. Treliving gets it. He's going to do everything required to get us to where we're going, and the pretenders are going to **** on him all along the way. Expect a Nylander trade and expect a lot of ****ing and moaning from insufferable Leafs fans when it happens. The success that's coming will all be well worth it....

GLG!