You know Toronto Sports is a dumpster fire when people are praising a GM who hasn't won a playoff round yet as "not brutal" Lol.
For years the Leafs operating strategy was spent chasing their own tail trying to squeak into a final playoff spot and for the vast majority of fans this was great and they actually supported building an entire team around Phil f***ing Kessel.
After all that pain and suffering we finally got the draft-rebuild that was absolutely necessary all that time, and now getting bounced in first round for 6 consecutive years is also now OK, not so much for actual Leafs fans, but more-so for the proponents of free internet blogger stats.
The more things change, the more things more-or-less stay the same.
It's getting cliché at this point to state but absolutely no-one back in 2016 would have thought the Leafs upside 6 years later was not only zero Cup wins, but shockingly zero playoff round wins.
That's abject managerial failure, and no matter how many excuses are presented year after year there's absolutely no disputing it after that duration of time.
The way these Leafs have been mis-managed is arguably as bad as the Burke/Ferguson era because it's just been an absolute tease. The rare pieces have been there all along but what's holding them back is an idealist GM who puts his own biased views of how a hockey team should be constructed and how the game ought to be played ahead of how the game actually is played, what gets consistent success in the playoffs, and now we as fans watch season after season wasted away.