Leafs GM Treliving says ‘our DNA has to change.’ What does that mean for the offseason?
“We’ll see,” was the common refrain during Toronto Maple Leafs GM Brad Treliving’s end-of season address Thursday morning at Ford Performance Centre. He used it so often it became tongue-and-cheek by the time he finished speaking to media.
It was sincere. Yes, the Leafs enter an offseason rife with questions after they bowed out shamefully to the Florida Panthers at home in a 6-1 Game 7 beatdown to close out the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. But Treliving doesn’t have the answers yet.
First off, there’s the matter of the Leafs’ prominent free agents. What happens to UFAs and longtime franchise stalwarts Mitch Marner and John Tavares?
Marner, 27, is easily the top UFA on the market if and when he makes it there, regardless of his well-documented shortcomings deep in playoff series. He’s a 102-point scorer, a high-end defensive forward and the NHL’s No. 8 point getter since his debut season in 2016-17. His AAV number will start with a 13 and a 14 will be likely if he’s fielding bids from all over the league July 1. Even if there’s a sense Toronto must change something about its makeup to avoid continued postseason disappointments, Marner isn’t an easy player to replace. Same goes for Tavares; as Treliving pointed out in his post-presser scrum, for all the talk of needing a second-line center, they had one this past season and he scored 38 goals. Treliving mostly maintained a poker face on negotiations, careful not to express any expectation of either player’s return. Treliving also said the “curveball” that was Brendan Shanahan’s departure as team president last week delayed the process of focusing on player contracts.
“Mitch is a tremendous player,” Treliving said. “We’ve talked throughout the year. You’ve heard me speak. I think he’s a star. We’re in that process right now. I had a meeting with all the players individually. We do our exit meetings. Mitch and I had a discussion. It’s emotional right now, right? And so my discussion with Mitch is, ‘Let’s all take a step back, let’s take a deep breath.’ I’ve got to decompress a little bit.
“Mitch has a say in this as well, right? So this isn’t the world according to Brad. He’s been a great player here. We’ll have to see…Do I think Mitch can succeed? Yes, I do. But we can’t be rigid in our thought process of saying we can only do something one way…same thing with John and really all of our UFAs, right? Really good players. I’m a huge John Tavares fan and had a really good discussion with him. We’ve got to take a step back, meet with our group, ‘How do we best move forward, what are the costs?’ all those things that go into a contract and everything else, and how does it fit within the puzzle?”
The challenge for the Leafs if Marner and/or Tavares walk: replacing them with other UFAs won’t be easy – and replicating their offensive contributions next to impossible – despite the vacated cap space. The likes of Sam Bennett, Brad Marchand, Brock Nelson and Nikolaj Ehlers will generate plenty of competition if they go to market, too. And not every player wants to live in the Toronto pressure cooker.
“There’s not a hockey tree out there that you just go and pluck the player off of,” Treliving said. “So our job is to make the team look at all the options. That’s what we’ve got to go through here right now. I can’t sit here and give you a definitive answer. We’ve got to, number one, go through the process with Mitch.”
The negotiation with breakout power forward Matthew Knies, fresh off a 29-goal regular season and an inspired playoff effort, is more straightforward. Treliving wouldn’t offer specifics on the team’s preference for a short- or long-term pact but did say he hoped to hammer out the extension as soon as possible.
But a scenario in which all Toronto’s top free agents return feels unlikely. As Treliving put it Wednesday, “there’s some DNA that has to change in our team,” and the Game 7 meltdown will stay with him a while.
“I’ll never question the want, the care,” Treliving said. “These guys want to be successful, they want to get to where we all want to get to. But one team looked more comfortable in the situation. There are more things that we can talk about, the nuances of the game in terms of our team structure, in terms of position, all that sort of stuff. But from the 10,000-foot view, when it became 1-0 [in Game 7], I felt there was a real tightness in our team. There was a real tightness in the moment. Champions are the calmest at the most critical time. And that’s an area that we’ve got to get through.”
Conquering those moments could require adding another dawg, an experienced veteran like a Bennett or Marchand who could switch from grinding the Leafs down as their opponent to helping them over the hump. It could also mean getting more assistance breaking the puck out of the defensive zone. Treliving expressed satisfaction Thursday at how his improved D-corps came together this past season, with Chris Tanev, Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Brandon Carlo making the Leafs bigger, rangier and harder to play against. But with Morgan Rielly’s game regressing and, as Treliving admitted Thursday, Rielly’s offense taking a backseat as he tried to focus more on buying into the team’s harder style, puck movement was a problem this postseason. The Leafs were outchanced at 5-on-5 in all 13 games and were frequently hemmed into their zone for agonizingly long stretches of time, most notably to open Game 7 against Florida. Despite the fact the Leafs’ entire blueline is signed through next season and beyond, it’s possible Treliving tinkers to improve the back-end puck play.
“In today’s game, I like the length of our defense, I like the makeup of our defense. We’ve still got to be able to get out of our own end,” Treliving said. “There are things we can do in terms of closing quicker and taking away space. And part of how we play will lend itself to giving up some volume. The idea is you’re going to give up a little volume, you’re going to take away the Grade-As, what we think are the most dangerous chances. That’s part of what we’ll do in the summer. In today’s game you need to be active. We need to get more offense from our defense.
“But in terms of personnel, we’ll see. I like the D-corps, but we can’t be rigid.”
We’ll see. There it is again. Pretty much the only things we know are set for the Leafs are a forward group built around Auston Matthews and William Nylander, a shutdown defense pair of Jake McCabe and Tanev, and a goaltending duo of Anthony Stolarz and Joseph Woll. The rest feels pretty wide open, and the next five weeks will be the most important of Treliving’s tenure as GM, making or breaking the Toronto’s next chapter of Stanley Cup contention.
_____
POST SPONSORED BY bet365
_____