Quoting: JaredOfLondon
the leafs are a significantly worse defensive team for many reasons, and most of them have to do with treliving not bringing any actually good defensive players and a bunch of one way offensive guys that he paid way too much for. the bottom 6 is a nightmare defensivly and he never even replaced Holl who was nothing special, but at least was a decent number 4. He brought in Domi and Reaves who are utter black holes and huge negatives and blew a massive chunk of cash on a defender who hasnt been good in years.
When you have a team that is top 10 by every defensive metric you can name and suddenly they are closer to 30, and you havent made 'significant changes' well guess what, you made some significant changes somewhere, because that just doesnt happen otherwise without significant injuries to guys who were good defensivly, and Brodie getting older doesnt explain away 1/10th of the fall.
You were in a thread not too long ago stating that one of the things we struggled to do was get the puck up the ice, which explains the Klingberg signing. And to that, I agree. Although, it turned out to be NOT what we needed, because Klingberg can't defend for anything (as with most primary puck movers).
I didn't mind the Domi signing, as he's finally starting to produce, but the Reavo signing was albatross. Everyone can agree on that. The Bert signing was fine, as he's been a great top 6 guy for years and we only signed him for 1 season, unfortunately, he just has not been playing at that same pace he was known for and people really wouldn't have guessed that.
Gio and Brodie falling off definitely had a massive impact on how our back end was performing. Gio was playing out of his mind randomly at 39 and Brodie was among the top percentile among other DFD's in the league, one of the best if that. Both of them taking a HUGE step back leaves a massive hole in the back end that is clearly showing this season.
Samsonov falling into the center of the Earth hurt us as well, as he did have a .919 last season for comparison.
I'm not going to defend Tree and say that he's started great, cause he hasn't. But I'd like to see what he can do in a span of 2-3 seasons before comparing him to Dubas. It's been one offseason and we haven't made it to the deadline yet. I want to see what else he can do.
Keefe, though, still needs to go. His time should have been up ages ago.