Post-Game Talk: Leafs Lose 3-2 in OT

[Beaumaris]

Sandin

Hairy arsed kid.

 

[leeroggy]

Not sure about Matthews or Marner, but I'd happily trade Tavares for any one of those three.

In effect you did

 

[Leaf4Life79]

I realize this however I've also realized it's going to be bloody expensive and I'm not sure our GM is going to be allowed to sell the farm to acquire a difference making defenseman that half the league would be competing for

I doubt a GM without a contract extension is going to get to write a massive check without Shanahans permission and he does have an interest in the teams future

Well...now more than ever, we need to sign a top 4 d with Rielly out a minimum of 10 games, missing our 1,2 and 3rd dmen is a serious blow, and sorry bro, I kinda came off as an arsehole and I didn't mean to come off that way!

 

[Leaf4Life79]

I seriously doubt Dubas has a blank check to do whatever he wants and I'm not sure anybody decent is even available this early in the season for anything less than an overpayment

He's been getting better as he's got this legs under him imo, if he and Sandin hold up I could see them logging big minutes

Well, let's see what happens..should be interesting!

 

[Kiwi]

Well...now more tha ever, we need to sign a top 4 d with Rielly out a minimum of 10 games, missing our 1,2 and 3rd dmen is a serious blow, and sorry bro, I kinda came off as an arsehoke and I didn't mean to come off that way!

All good man

It's bloody thin on the blue line but they may just need to tread water for a few weeks while teams that are going to sell sort themselves out

If there is a deal available now i'm willing to bet the team is trying to get it done though

Well, let's see what happens..should be interesting!

They have to step up or were ******, I think Liljegren can do it but Sandin remains to be seen

 

[Leaf4Life79]

All good man

It's bloody thin on the blue line but they may just need to tread water for a few weeks while teams that are going to sell sort themselves out

If there is a deal available now i'm willing to bet the team is trying to get it done though



They have to step up or were ******, I think Liljegren can do it but Sandin remains to be seen

Agreed, Sandin is not offf to a great start..kudos to him fighting buddy that tried to take Matthews out, he got his ass kicked, but that is a commendable act, and everyone should stick up for everyone. I still feel that he is gonna sign someone soon, just my gutt feeling.

 

[notDatsyuk]

In effect you did

I'll bite. How did I do that?

 

[Le Magnifique]

A top heavy forward lineup should dominate in 3on3 OT. And it's probably the part of the modern NHL that's the least reliant on coaching and strategy. Regular season OT is largely about skill, player chemistry, anticipation AND hustle.


3-7 in OT during the past 6 playoffs.

Yeah but it's not 3 on 3....
I dunno. Just let me sleep okay?

 

[leeroggy]

I'll bite. How did I do that?

Signing Tavares meant not spending the money on the goalie/defense. Here's one article on the available UFA's that summer:

The top 30 unrestricted free agents of 2018

The remaining UFA class in 2018 offers a handful of high-impact players, but there's a rapid dropoff. It's an extremely shallow group this summer.

thehockeynews.com

Certainly not the greatest, but enough that say 3-4 players instead of Tavares might have been wiser given where the team has evolved now. Bottom 6 scoring and grit, some defense and a goalie.

Interesting that Lehner was ranked well, coming off some issues. The Isles were able to get him back on track, and the Toronto market wasn't the best for someone with acknowledged mental issues (I'm thinking solely about the intensity of your media coverage here). So, signing him might not have happened solely because Lehner would have been hesitant.

But say you went Perron, Hutton or Halak and Maroon here. Probably close to Tavares' total salary, but you wouldn't have given the 7 years either, so some flexibility would still be there in a few years. Might have even been able to afford Ian Cole too. That's some real sandpaper in that grouping.

That's my point. And I know plenty of Leaf's fans would argue a similar strategy.

 

[Gary Nylund]

Signing Tavares meant not spending the money on the goalie/defense. Here's one article on the available UFA's that summer:

The top 30 unrestricted free agents of 2018

The remaining UFA class in 2018 offers a handful of high-impact players, but there's a rapid dropoff. It's an extremely shallow group this summer.

thehockeynews.com

Certainly not the greatest, but enough that say 3-4 players instead of Tavares might have been wiser given where the team has evolved now. Bottom 6 scoring and grit, some defense and a goalie.

Interesting that Lehner was ranked well, coming off some issues. The Isles were able to get him back on track, and the Toronto market wasn't the best for someone with acknowledged mental issues (I'm thinking solely about the intensity of your media coverage here). So, signing him might not have happened solely because Lehner would have been hesitant.

But say you went Perron, Hutton or Halak and Maroon here. Probably close to Tavares' total salary, but you wouldn't have given the 7 years either, so some flexibility would still be there in a few years. Might have even been able to afford Ian Cole too. That's some real sandpaper in that grouping.

That's my point. And I know plenty of Leaf's fans would argue a similar strategy.

Maybe. It's easy to pick the players now (years later) with the benefit of hindsight but what if we picked players that didn't work out like the ones you listed instead? We also had the option of signing Tavares and then trading one of the other highly paid forwards to fill grit, defense or a goalie. Tavares has played so well for us and still is, seems like a pretty great signing to me.

 

[notDatsyuk]

Signing Tavares meant not spending the money on the goalie/defense. Here's one article on the available UFA's that summer:

The top 30 unrestricted free agents of 2018

The remaining UFA class in 2018 offers a handful of high-impact players, but there's a rapid dropoff. It's an extremely shallow group this summer.

thehockeynews.com

Certainly not the greatest, but enough that say 3-4 players instead of Tavares might have been wiser given where the team has evolved now. Bottom 6 scoring and grit, some defense and a goalie.

Interesting that Lehner was ranked well, coming off some issues. The Isles were able to get him back on track, and the Toronto market wasn't the best for someone with acknowledged mental issues (I'm thinking solely about the intensity of your media coverage here). So, signing him might not have happened solely because Lehner would have been hesitant.

But say you went Perron, Hutton or Halak and Maroon here. Probably close to Tavares' total salary, but you wouldn't have given the 7 years either, so some flexibility would still be there in a few years. Might have even been able to afford Ian Cole too. That's some real sandpaper in that grouping.

That's my point. And I know plenty of Leaf's fans would argue a similar strategy.

Ok - I thought you were suggesting I personally did it. The 'you' was directed at Toronto rather than me. I didn't realize you were an outside agitator. ;-)

Personally, I completely agree, and thought even at the time that signing Tavares was a mistake. I would have preferred to have kept Komarov and Martin and added a D or goalie with the extra.

I agree with another poster that there is some advantage to knowing which other players available at the time have worked out, but since Tavares, despite his personal stats, hasn't really helped us, I think we would have been at least as well served without him.

 

[Gary Nylund]

Ok - I thought you were suggesting I personally did it. The 'you' was directed at Toronto rather than me. I didn't realize you were an outside agitator. ;-)

Personally, I completely agree, and thought even at the time that signing Tavares was a mistake. I would have preferred to have kept Komarov and Martin and added a D or goalie with the extra.

I agree with another poster that there is some advantage to knowing which other players available at the time have worked out, but since Tavares, despite his personal stats, hasn't really helped us, I think we would have been at least as well served without him.

That argument is used all the time to support every possible POV anyone has - we haven't won in the playoffs doing the way we did it therefore ... and with that supporting argument, you could argue that every move we made has been wrong. So we maybe we should have traded Matthews because we would have been at least as well served without him ...

Don't get me wrong, there is some logic there too, I mean it's hard to argue that nothing has been done wrong (though some people seem to passionately defend that POV) but it's a lot harder to say what specifically we should have done differently, at least for me it is. And it's hard for me to point to signing JT being mistake because he has been everything we'd hoped he'd be.

 

[notDatsyuk]

That argument is used all the time to support every possible POV anyone has - we haven't won in the playoffs doing the way we did it therefore ... and with that supporting argument, you could argue that every move we made has been wrong. So we maybe we should have traded Matthews because we would have been at least as well served without him ...

Don't get me wrong, there is some logic there too, I mean it's hard to argue that nothing has been done wrong (though some people seem to passionately defend that POV) but it's a lot harder to say what specifically we should have done differently, at least for me it is. And it's hard for me to point to signing JT being mistake because he has been everything we'd hoped he'd be.

I guess it boils down to what you want, or what you expected him to be.

I wanted a winning team, and what we needed, in my opinion, was defence and goaltending, as we had just acquired several young talented forwards.

Instead we brought in, at too high a price, another offensive forward, and as a result, lost some useful pieces.

We still need defence and goaltending, plus physical journeymen, and despite having lots of scoring power when the games are easy, we go nowhere when it's important.

Tavares was the piece we didn't need, and has hindered our success. I don't blame him at all - he's just not what we needed.

Sure, there are all kinds of arguments you can come up with based on "we didn't win, so...", but pretending they're all equally reasonable is wrong. We didn't score enough against Tampa, so we should have pulled the goalie midway through the second period.

 

[Gabriel426]

Good players + Bad 3 on 3=
A coaching problem

I really don’t see how Keefe can out coach anyone in this league.

 

[Gabriel426]

I looked at this and wonder what does this mean when it comes to Leafs and cap allocation

I thought Messi signed with PSG as a free transfer like Leafs signing JT.

 

[Gabriel426]

I guess it boils down to what you want, or what you expected him to be.

I wanted a winning team, and what we needed, in my opinion, was defence and goaltending, as we had just acquired several young talented forwards.

Instead we brought in, at too high a price, another offensive forward, and as a result, lost some useful pieces.

We still need defence and goaltending, plus physical journeymen, and despite having lots of scoring power when the games are easy, we go nowhere when it's important.

Tavares was the piece we didn't need, and has hindered our success. I don't blame him at all - he's just not what we needed.

Sure, there are all kinds of arguments you can come up with based on "we didn't win, so...", but pretending they're all equally reasonable is wrong. We didn't score enough against Tampa, so we should have pulled the goalie midway through the second period.

The thing is, the JT signing is supposed to help the Leafs to take the next step, which is winning rounds in playoffs and even the Cup.
The fact that the Leafs is still just a playoffs teams since signing JT just showed JT didn’t help at all.
If the Leafs actually advanced a few rounds or even won the Cup , there is no question that signing JT is a genius move or at the very least a great move.
Put it another way, if says MGT traded AM and MM and Willie ends up playing like Mack(after the Avs traded ROR and Duchense) then Willie leads the Leafs to win the Cup. Even if all the players, picks.. from the AM and MM trades turns out to be AHLers, and AM and MM continues to do what they can do, it would still consider to be great trades bc that change up helped the Leafs to win the Cup.

 

[Gary Nylund]

I guess it boils down to what you want, or what you expected him to be.

I wanted a winning team, and what we needed, in my opinion, was defence and goaltending, as we had just acquired several young talented forwards.

Instead we brought in, at too high a price, another offensive forward, and as a result, lost some useful pieces.

We still need defence and goaltending, plus physical journeymen, and despite having lots of scoring power when the games are easy, we go nowhere when it's important.

Tavares was the piece we didn't need, and has hindered our success. I don't blame him at all - he's just not what we needed.

Sure, there are all kinds of arguments you can come up with based on "we didn't win, so...", but pretending they're all equally reasonable is wrong. We didn't score enough against Tampa, so we should have pulled the goalie midway through the second period.

Yeah I get what you're saying but still, we could have traded one of the other big 3 to fill those other spaces if that's where you'd rather spend. You can say we didn't need him and sure with hindsight, I'd rather have gone down a different path but that's just because we've failed in the playoffs and I don't think anyone really expected that to happen the way it did. 6 1st round exits, but we could have just as easily won the last 5 series we played, that all went the distance. I still don't understand what the hell went wrong and I probably never will.

Even looking at the team today, say you remove JT and have that money to spend elsewhere. Are you sure we're a better team for it? Maybe we are but I'm not sure, remove JT and we're awfully thin down the middle. And you can't just pick and choose all the UFA's you want either with the freed up money if you remove JT, not everyone wants to come here, you usually have to overpay for UFA's which is another big problem so I dunno, we could easily be worse. And before Muzzin got hurt, I liked our D a lot, in fact our D has been pretty good, maybe better than pretty good ever since Brodie arrived.

I kind of like having JT on our team and have a hard time saying no to adding a prime asset like to our talent pool without having to part with any players/picks. There were many teams that wanted him and the signing was widely considered a huge win for us. Maybe we'll win the cup this season (or at least make the finals) and the narrative will shift again, we'll see.

 

[notDatsyuk]

Yeah I get what you're saying but still, we could have traded one of the other big 3 to fill those other spaces if that's where you'd rather spend. You can say we didn't need him and sure with hindsight, I'd rather have gone down a different path but that's just because we've failed in the playoffs and I don't think anyone really expected that to happen the way it did. 6 1st round exits, but we could have just as easily won the last 5 series we played, that all went the distance. I still don't understand what the hell went wrong and I probably never will.

Even looking at the team today, say you remove JT and have that money to spend elsewhere. Are you sure we're a better team for it? Maybe we are but I'm not sure, remove JT and we're awfully thin down the middle. And you can't just pick and choose all the UFA's you want either with the freed up money if you remove JT, not everyone wants to come here, you usually have to overpay for UFA's which is another big problem so I dunno, we could easily be worse. And before Muzzin got hurt, I liked our D a lot, in fact our D has been pretty good, maybe better than pretty good ever since Brodie arrived.

I kind of like having JT on our team and have a hard time saying no to adding a prime asset like to our talent pool without having to part with any players/picks. There were many teams that wanted him and the signing was widely considered a huge win for us. Maybe we'll win the cup this season (or at least make the finals) and the narrative will shift again, we'll see.

I think some of us did see our not advancing because we were top heavy, and I'm not sure trading one of our younger, better players to fix the holes would have been better.

We have no way of knowing if we'd have been better or worse with other players, but we do know that he really hasn't moved the needle, at least as far as playoff success goes.

I like our current D too, and our goalie situation, although not great, seems to be better than expected. But as the D improves the forward depth worsens. Too much spent on three players (or four or five, however you care to look at it) means there's never enough to patch all the holes at the same time.

I hope I'm proven wrong, but we're down to three chances.