SIMMONS: Dubas' Maple Leaf problems extend well beyond trade deadline – Toronto Sun

This team is a mess

This is not a time for Kyle Dubas to be worrying about Monday’s trade deadline in the National Hockey League.

This is a time to assess and try to make sense of the disaster that this season is turning out to be for the Maple Leafs — as disappointing a year as I can remember considering the circumstances, the salaries and the expectations.

This is a time for Dubas and his front office and Brendan Shanahan and Sheldon Keefe to do an internal overhaul and examination because this season, unlike any in recent memory, hasn’t unfolded anywhere near where the executives or fans expected them to be.

Dubas fired coach Mike Babcock in November. That had to happen. Initially, the team took off under Keefe, excited about a new style of play, excited that the coach they’d had enough of was gone. Keefe went 14-3-1 from the November day he was hired to the end of December. That was incredible. It was also unsustainable.

In goal differential, a statistic Babcock adores, the Leafs were +22 over that time. Since January, the Leafs have won eight of 20 games, are a minus team in goal differential, haven’t been able to deal with injuries and poor goaltending from Frederik Andersen, and they appear to have little sense of team, sense of occasion, ability to deal with the daily circumstances of their jobs.

That, more than anything, has to upset Dubas — and have fingers of doubt pointed at him. He put so much faith and so many of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment dollars in the hands of the Leafs leadership group and he has to wonder, as they continue to flounder, what precisely he is paying for. And where is the value that comes from building a team around four apparent superstars.

There are different kinds of stars in hockey and always have been. There are the big scorers who change teams, the way the Boston first line of Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak change and mould the Bruins almost every night. And there are, what I call, accumulators of statistics.

At the end of the season, and sometimes during the season, the numbers look fine. But when it matters, when it really matters, where have they been, Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner, John Tavares and William Nylander? Are they changing games the way Sidney Crosby changed that awful game in Pittsburgh — awful if you’re a Leaf fan — on Tuesday night.

Crosby scored the winning goal at the 2010 Olympics in overtime and scored a goal in the gold-medal winning game in Sochi four years later. That wasn’t accidental. Nor was it accidental when Jonathan Toews scored the first goal in Vancouver and Sochi in the gold medal games. That’s what winners do. They change games. They don’t leave it to anyone else.

What kind of superstars is Dubas paying for and banking his reputation and maybe his future on?]

Matthews leads the NHL in goal scoring. Leafs were down 5-0 when he scored on the powerplay Tuesday night. He got his goal. The team got whomped, and the way in which they were defeated, with Evgeni Malkin out of the Penguins lineup, was more than troublesome.

They didn’t compete very hard. They had no sense of purpose or occasion. On penalty kill, Pierre McGuire pointed out regularly on NBCSN players were out of position and often didn’t have their sticks on the ice or sticks in the passing lanes. The Leafs were susceptible to the cross ice pass, not just against the Penguins, but against just about every team with offensive quality they have played of late.

This is supposed to be a playoff race for the final spot in the Atlantic Division. This is supposed to be a team in contention. Shanahan said at the beginning of the season that he wanted the Leafs to be one of eight teams with a chance to win the Stanley Cup. Maybe now they’re Top 16. Maybe.

And almost all the reasons for letting Babcock go have crept back into Maple Leafs games. Babcock’s fate was sealed after a horrible, careless game in Pittsburgh in November. Leafs would have fired him the next day had the Hall of Fame ceremony not been going on. So they waited one more game and let him go.

The Pittsburgh game Tuesday night looked a lot like the game that doomed Babcock. Aside from Zach Hyman, there was almost no one fighting on loose pucks. They had little offensive zone time, few offensive chances, were soft in the neutral zone, bottled up terribly by Penguins forechecking, and were disastrous on the penalty kill, which has been a Leaf difficulty coming on four years now.

What can Dubas do now to change the direction of the team? He’s played his big cards this season. He fired the coach. That worked temporarily. The team is now all over the place, playing the kind of games that got Babcock dismissed. His big trade was to bring in Tyson Barrie and Alex Kerfoot for Nazem Kadri and that hasn’t helped at all. He waited too long to trade for Jack Campbell and bring in a backup goalie. The five or six points they relinquished could be the points that cost them the post season.

Dubas, like his team, hasn’t had a good year. And what the best general managers do — and we still don’t know where he fits in on that scale — when they assess their teams, when they realize that some moves aren’t working, is find a way to fix them. You don’t sit and watch and wait and let the same thing happen over and over again. This isn’t an anomaly of a season. They are what their record says they are — maybe worse — with a bigger problem.

When the game seems to matter most — the two games against Florida thus far, the home game against Chicago, the game in Buffalo last week, a clear chance to pick up two points on the Panthers — they have been at their worst and their weakest. And afterwards you get the typical dressing room response. We like our team. We have to play better. We’re better than this. We have to play harder. Blah blah blah for the cameras.

How many times have you heard those same words this season?

How many times have those words fixed the Leafs problems?

Dubas lost Kadri and signed Kasperi Kapanen and Andreas Johnsson for $3 million a year. Before he got hurt, Johnsson hadn’t done much and Kapanen’s season can be filed like the team, under grand disappointment. Before he got hurt, Dubas brought in Cody Ceci. Dubas is below the Mendoza Line is his trading percentage and salary cap management of the past nine months.

And with all the pressure of Monday’s trade deadline, he is probably better off taking a step back than doing anything foolhardy here.

And for all the devout followers of analytics, who laughed with glee when the modern-thinking Dubas was named as GM, ahead of Lou Lamoriello and Mark Hunter, ask yourself this: What exactly did analytics have to do with getting drubbed in Pittsburgh on Tuesday?

Martin Marincin was out of position on two power play goals. Andersen coughed one up on another one. Random plays. Simple mistakes. Players in front of the Toronto net unattended. The goals were mostly tap-ins from in close to empty nets because Leafs seemed clueless without the puck and unable to deal with cross ice passes anywhere in their defensive zone.

The Leafs play Pittsburgh again Thursday night. I expect a better performance. How much better I don’t know. After the Buffalo game on the weekend, they should have been better Tuesday night and weren’t. It was as soft a performance as they’ve had all season. They have players hurt — so does just about everybody. But aside from Morgan Rielly, who was not having a great season to begin with, the Leafs are playing with Matthews, Marner, Tavares and Nylander: Difference makers should be making a difference.

Last year and the year before, there was optimism at the trade deadline. There was a sense the Leafs needed a player, like Jake Muzzin, who could help the team at playoff time. Now it’s not really about contending.

Even if this team makes the playoffs, they’ll be an easy out for somebody. What Dubas and Shanahan and Keefe need to determine is: What is this team now, what is it going forward? Those are the hard questions and the hard answers. And if the trade deadline passes without Leaf activity of consequence, so be it. There is no one-day, one-move solution available.

This team requires a hockey autopsy of sorts. The bodies may not be dead yet. The club looked close to that Tuesday night in Pittsburgh.

ssimmons@postmedia.com

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