McMann was traded to the Kraken on Friday for a second- and fourth-round pick.
After a trade from the Toronto Maple Leafs to the Seattle Kraken, Bobby McMann has opened up about why he believes the club struggled to put it all together this season.
McMann, an unrestricted free agent at the end of this year, was one of three players traded by Maple Leafs general manager Brad Treliving at this year's deadline, with Scott Laughton and Nicolas Roy being the others.
The 29-year-old power forward was sixth in team scoring — with 19 goals and 32 points in 60 games — before he was moved. He garnered a 2027 conditional second-round pick, plus a 2026 fourth-rounder for Toronto from Seattle.
Had the Maple Leafs been in the playoff picture, rather than falling out of it before the Olympic break, it's doubtful McMann, Laughton, or Roy would have been traded.
But it's a pretty bleak picture when a club goes from winning the Atlantic Division last year to the bottom of the division's basement this year, likely missing out on the playoffs for the first time since 2016.
In an interview with Joshua Kloke of The Athletic, days after being traded away from the only organization he'd ever known, McMann attempted to pinpoint what went wrong for the Maple Leafs.
"Trying to change the approach to the game. Whether that's systems, line combinations, guys trying to do different things on the ice because we’re not finding success individually, you start to deviate from the game plan. You see it in games when you go down or any games where you've had a few consecutive wins, you get disconnected," McMann told Kloke.
"Every team in this league is so exceptionally good that when you're not working as a cohesive unit all the time and you're disconnected, things can start to go south pretty quickly," he continued. "I think guys were maybe overthinking things a little bit too much, thinking about 'OK, how do we get this back?' rather than trusting the process of the game plan in place at start of the year. Let's stick with what our systems and plan we've been working at for quite a long time. We've been working with these lines and combinations we had, to go through these situations."
Toronto struggled coming out of the gate this season, sporting a 5-5-1 record through its first 10 games. After a stronger November, Toronto's game dipped again in December, and because of issues with the power play, among other things, assistant coach Marc Savard was fired.
The Maple Leafs won nine of their next 13 games before their game dropped off once again. Entering the Olympic break, they were six points out of a postseason spot, but they really fell out of the playoff picture after losing games coming out of the break.
"We had a lot of key players out of games early in the season. And then when you go through those games, you're not winning as much and then you get those players back and it’s like, 'OK, we should be good.' But sometimes, the team isn't clicking where you want it to be," McMann said. "Then you start trying to change things up a little bit. I think that's where you start to run into problems, instead of trusting the system."
The Maple Leafs are coming off their eighth straight loss after falling to the Montreal Canadiens 3-1 on Tuesday. The team has now lost 14 of their last 17 games and currently sit seventh-last in the NHL with 65 points.
McMann arrived in Seattle earlier this week but has yet to dress for the Kraken due to work visa issues. Seattle is set to host the Colorado Avalanche on Thursday before facing the Vancouver Canucks on Saturday night.