The Toronto Maple Leafs will try to win every game for the rest of this season. But the teams around them in the standings are looking toward the future and tanking the right way.
A day after firing GM Brad Treliving, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment CEO Keith Pelley told reporters on Tuesday that he will do pretty much anything to help Toronto one day win a Stanley Cup.
But not if it means purposely losing games in hopes of securing a first-round pick for this year's draft.
"There is zero chance that the Toronto Maple Leafs will tank," Pelley said. "I don't believe in it. Ownership doesn't believe in it. I grew up in an environment when you played sports, you tried to win every single game."
Toronto's first-round pick in this year's draft is top-five protected. That means that the Leafs, which have the ninth-worst win percentage in the league, have seven games to try and get as far down in the standings as possible.
But Pelley said the team has been given a different objective in these final two weeks of the season.
"In the last seven games, we'll try to win every single game," he said.
In other words, this isn't going to be the Shanaplan, 2.0.
It was back in 2015-16 when the Leafs traded their captain, their No. 1 goalie and four other regulars in hopes of bottoming out and securing the No. 1 overall pick in the draft. It worked out as planned. The Leafs, which finished last in the NHL standings by one point, won the draft lottery and selected Auston Matthews with the top pick.
It was a blueprint of success that led to nine consecutive playoff appearances and provided the Leafs with what Pelley called one of their "foundational pieces."
This year, there's plenty of foundational pieces to be found at the top of the draft, where Gavin McKenna, Ivar Stenberg and Keaton Verhoff are jockeying to be the No. 1 overall pick. Likewise, there are a number of teams now trying to position themselves to land one of them.
The Vancouver Canucks, which are the worst team in the NHL by an 18-point margin, have lost six straight games. Chicago, which is the second-worst team, currently has an 18-year-old rookie with five games under his belt as the No. 2 center. And Calgary, which is the third-worst team, recently traded its top-scoring forward and its top two defensemen at the deadline.
Meanwhile, the Florida Panthers announced on Tuesday that it's unlikely that Aleksander Barkov, Brad Marchand, Sam Reinhart, Anton Lundell, Niko Mikkola, Evan Rodrigues and several others will play in another game this year.
Barkov, who has been practising with the team for some time now, was considered a late-season option. But with eight games remaining and the team in 27th place overall, Maurice said it's not worth the risk — both to Barkov and seemingly to the Panthers' chances of getting as high a pick as possible.
"They give you like a two-month window on these knee injuries," Maurice told reporters. "He will get inside that two-month window, but why would we? We'll take the whole two months before he plays a hockey game again. We wouldn't want to… if it's six to eight months and we put him in at seven and something happens, that doesn't make much sense. We'll let him go straight through the entire rehab process."
Take note, Toronto — that's how you tank.
Of course, whether Pelley wants to admit it or not, the Leafs have been tanking in their own way for a while now.
What else would you call this two-month stretch that Toronto has been mired in. The Leafs lost eight straight games coming out of the Olympic break, were sellers at the deadline and shut down Matthews after undergoing season-ending knee surgery.
Pelley might not want to call that tanking, probably because he doesn't want to get in trouble with the league. But with no GM and three players called up from the minors for their last game, it's not exactly what you call competing for a playoff spot.
"Our teams don't tank," Bettman said of the Leafs back in 2016. "Look at what Toronto's doing. I think they've decided that they need to regroup and… they're developing the young kids, and they're building for the future. I'm not an expert in putting teams together, but it's clear that they have a plan and they're sticking to it. And that's the most important thing.
"You've got to have a plan, and you've got to stick to it."
Indeed, as Toronto showed in its 5-4 overtime win against Anaheim on Monday, players don't purposely lose games. However, teams can make winning objectively more difficult by resting players and giving additional ice time to youngsters.
In other words, with seven games left, don't be surprised if Leafs fans see more of rookies Easton Cowan and less of William Nylander.
Just don't call it tanking.
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