Win or lose, the 2023-24 Toronto Maple Leafs are messy as hell

Credit: Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and T.J. Brodie (© John E. Sokolowski-USA TODAY Sports)

Sure, the start to the Toronto Maple Leafs’ divisional battle against the Tampa Bay Lightning was nightmare fuel under any circumstances. The PA announcement of Matthew Knies’ opening goal was barely finished by the time Victor Hedman tied the game 35 seconds later. Within eight and a half minutes, Nikita Kucherov had already buried two one-timer goals, prompting Bronx cheers for embattled Leaf goaltender Ilya Samsonov from the Scotiabank Arena not-so-faithful. By the 15:13 mark: four Tampa goals, chasing Samsonov from the crease in favor of Joseph Woll. By the first intermission, the Leafs were booed off their own ice.

That embarrassing period was all the more deflating considering the context. It wasn’t the forgivable blip that befalls even the best NHL teams once in a while, like when the Colorado Avalanche ate a 7-0 beatdown from the Vegas Golden Knights over the weekend. No, that soggy pool noodle of a performance came from a team (a) already mired in a four-game losing streak going into Monday and (b) having already promised an emphatic emotional response after losing Timothy Liljegren in a controversial collision with the Boston Bruins’ Brad Marchand last week, only to lose again to the Buffalo Sabres Saturday. Your backs are to the wall, your coach, Sheldon Keefe, has indicated clear concern about the direction of the team, and that is your response?

But wait: that was just the first period.

“I don’t think anyone was pouting in the intermission,” Knies said. “Everyone was really excited to get back out there and prove people wrong.

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Then came the second, in which the Leafs showed the best version of themselves: the berserker-mode group that wills itself back from large deficits thanks to its top-end talent. It included Auston Matthews burying his 12^th and 13^th goals of the season in Game No. 12 and egging on the fans, whom he claimed he didn’t want “to go to sleep quite yet.” Keefe called it Toronto’s best period of the season thus far.

It gave way to the two fastest goals scored by any team this season, an eight-second blink of an eye early in the third period in which Calle Jarnkrok deposited a rebound from a Nick Robertson shot and Mitch Marner got sprung for a breakaway goal. The Lightning did tie the game late in the third, but Jarnkrok tallied in overtime on a perfect side-door feed from Morgan Rielly to clinch a Toronto win. Losing streak: over.

“We don’t have any quit in this locker room,” Marner said. “We have a lot of trust in our group that regardless of the situation, we’re never out of a game. But we don’t want to be in these situations a lot, because obviously (comebacks) won’t happen every night.”

It was sloppy, it was entertaining, and it’s an experience we should get used to. These are your 2023-24 Toronto Maple Leafs, and they are a hot mess, for better or for worse.

On one hand, Monday’s dramatic comeback might have felt like a season changer, a moment we’ll look back on months from now as the one that saved Keefe’s job just when things were starting to resemble Mike Babcock’s last stand in November 2019. Keefe certainly expressed a lot of enthusiasm about the (delayed) response.

“I thought it was excellent. Obviously required,” he said. “We’ve responded well all season in those moments. There’s a lot of things that haven’t gone good for us in the season, but we’ve responded in those moments a lot and kept going. So I was really proud of the way the guys stepped up in that second period.”

It’s a rousing narrative, one the team was clearly buying into Monday night after the game. But it’s far more likely we see many more lead changes, swoons, slumps, streaks, comebacks, blown leads – and more questions about whether Keefe can get this team over the hump in the spring.

Why?

On one hand, much of the team GM Brad Treliving inherited from Kyle Dubas remains. The Leafs still have the star power to bring fans to their feet on any given night, as we saw Monday. Matthews is on pace for 89 goals; he, Marner, and William Nylander track for more than 100 points through 12 games. As a team, the Leafs continue to produce high-end offense like they have in every single season of the Matthews/Marner era. They’re top-10 in goals per game, sixth in power-play efficiency. On the other hand: their scoring depth looks like it could be a problem. Matthews, Marner, Nylander and John Tavares have scored 29 of Toronto’s 41 goals this season, an alarming 70.7 percent. And if you squint closer at the team’s offensive metrics: they actually rank in the bottom third of the NHL in 5-on-5 scoring chances per 60. In each of the previous seven seasons, they’ve finished top-five in that category. The likes of Tyler Bertuzzi, Max Domi and company aren’t pulling their weight in support roles.

Worse yet: in the later years of the Dubas era, the Leafs improved to a much stronger two-way group, consistently placing in the top third of the league in most defensive metrics. The massive turnover this past offseason among their depth players made it clear they were not going to maintain that element of their identity. They lost Ryan O’Reilly, a former Selke Trophy winner who still has one of the best sticks of any forward in the league. They lost Luke Schenn, who was easily their best all-around defenseman during the 2023 playoffs. They lost one of their key penalty killers in Alexander Kerfoot. And Treliving proactively added multiple players known to be black holes on the defensive side of the puck: Ryan Reaves, Max Domi and John Klingberg all carried frightening defensive metrics on their resumes heading into this season.

The point being: we knew, or should’ve known, what to expect from the 2023-24 team from the start. The data was available in plain site. It’s thus no surprise to see Toronto parked in the bottom third of the league in scoring chances against, high-danger chances against and expected goals against per 60 at 5-on-5. With Reaves on the ice: outscored 8-0, outchanced 46-28. With Domi: even in goals but outchanced 82-63. Klingberg: outscored 10-7, outchanced 111-85. This team was built to allow more scoring chances in early July.

The 2023-24 Maple Leafs are probably still a playoff team. But they’re not nearly as deep. They’re going to be far more dependent on goaltending for their success than in recent seasons, and it appears Woll will be the rock they ultimately rely on to stabilize their net. Gone is the efficient 50-win machine we saw in the final couple seasons of the Dubas era. This incarnation will closer resemble the carnivalesque versions of 2017 to 2020, trading chances and winning plenty of 6-5 hockey games. There is thus a good chance this team has a tough time cracking 100 points instead of cruising past 110 and knowing its playoff seeding months in advance.

But hey – perhaps a more battle-tested version of the Leafs, fighting for points all the way into April, will be better positioned to win playoff games. Just ask the 2022-23 Florida Panthers about that.

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Win or lose, the 2023-24 Toronto Maple Leafs are messy as hell

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