Is It Time For The Toronto Maple Leafs To Hit The Panic Button?

At times this season, the Toronto Maple Leafs have been a very good hockey team. You don’t either occupy the top spot in the highly-competitive Atlantic Division or sit close to the top of the Atlantic if you’re not playing well for long stretches. 

However – and basically, since the start of this month – the Maple Leafs have been thoroughly outclassed, outworked, and out-everything’d as of late. And after Saturday night's 4-2 loss to their Atlantic rivals from Ottawa, it’s time to be honest: if it’s not quite time for Leafs fans to press the panic button, it’s most definitely time for them to put their finger on the panic button.

Against the Senators, the Florida Panthers, the Vegas Golden Knights and against the Colorado Avalanche, the Leafs have been regularly and repeatedly beaten. Beaten in puck battles, beaten for space in front of their net and their opponent’s net, beaten in terms of the speed and tempo of the game, beaten on the penalty kill, beaten on offense and defense, and beaten when it comes to goaltending. To top it off, the team has lost all but one of their last six contests.

Other than that, everything’s terrific in Toronto.

Leafs coaches and players can pretend all they want that they’ve narrowly missed out on winning their recent games, but those are excuses. And while the Buds are the NHL champion in excuses, that doesn’t matter one lick to the bottom line at the moment. That is a condemnation of just about everyone in the lineup.

Against the Senators on Saturday, star winger Mitch Marner was more or less invisible. Star defenseman Morgan Rielly was a liability in his own zone. Blueliner Oliver Ekman-Larsson is continuing to be a penalty factory. Goalie Anthony Stolarz allowed a couple of soft goals.  And forwards Pontus Holmberg, Max Domi, Calle Jarnkrok and Bobby McMann were absolute non-factors.

You can also blame captain Auston Matthews – and really, that’s fair, given that he’s representing this tired-looking, worn-out group – but at least Matthews is obviously playing through a major injury. He hasn’t been the same for some time now. But as for the rest of the Leafs’ lineup, it’s well past time for should’ves and would’ves. The blame falls squarely on the team as a whole.

For those reasons, the Leafs deserve to be where they are at the moment – in third place in the Atlantic, just four points ahead of Ottawa as the first wild-card team in the Eastern Conference. Optimists will counter that Toronto is also four points out of first place in the Atlantic, but let’s be real here – if the playoffs began today, would you pick the Leafs to beat the Panthers? Would Toronto be favored against the Tampa Bay Lightning? Would Leafs fans feel comfortable about a first-round series against the Senators? The answer, to all three of those questions, is a hearty, "Hell no”. Toronto has lost itself into an underdog role. That’s not the fault of the media or management. It all falls on the players.

Is there still time for the Leafs to figure out what ails them? Sure there is. But the way this Toronto team has fallen apart in the past two weeks, it’s completely understandable that Buds fans are ready to press the panic button. They’ve seen this disappearing act before – for many, many years – and they’re beyond-sickened by it. 

If the next month of regular-season games and the next two weeks after that in the playoffs sees more of the same brutal play from this Leafs team, it’s clearly going to be time to blow this roster to smithereens and change things from the foundation up. No more excuses, and no more false hope. With apologies to “Top Gun”, Toronto has now entered the danger zone. And nothing less than a massive turnaround is going to prevent the Leafs from feeling the well-deserved wrath of their long-suffering fan base.

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