“You’re either winning or you’re learning” is one of my favourite sayings in sports.

It’s a constructive way to frame a game in a glass-half-full type of way. You either celebrate your success or learn what you can do better for the next time. 

Frustratingly, the Leafs are neither winning nor learning right now.

General Manager Brad Treliving set the tone this season by doing the absolute bare minimum from training camp onward, culminating in a trade deadline where he made a grand total of three trades. The roster wasn’t turned over nearly enough, and the only acquisition Treliving will make from another team this season is waiver claim Troy Stecher, unless we want to count Cayden Primeau and Sammy Blais (which I don’t — they were warm bodies who were claimed and later lost to waivers). 

They can’t fix this now, obviously, with the deadline passed. But it doesn’t mean we should be watching the exact same garbage night after night.

Where to begin?

How many more games will Morgan Rielly and Brandon Carlo be paired together? It’s been over a year since the trade, and it hasn’t looked good pretty much the entire time. What more is there to see at this point? McCabe-Carlo has at least looked like a credible matchup pairing at times. Ride it out, and find out if there’s something there. The best-case scenario is that it’s effective, and the team can potentially feel good about the duo for next season. The worst case is that they also show poorly, but at least we’ve learned something.

This basically applies across the board with the defensive pairings. It has been this way since the Olympic break, although Treliving did put on a brave face and suggest that the Leafs decided to sell well before the break. 

The forward group and its deployment are an even bigger mess to sort through. With eight minutes left in a game that was over in the first period vs. Tampa, Jacob Quillan was clocking in at 6:39 of ice time while playing on a fourth line with Steven Lorentz and Calle Jarnkrok. In fact, the only reason his ice time was even that high is that he was receiving second-unit penalty-killing time. A third of Quillan’s TOI by that point came shorthanded. What are the Leafs learning about the player in that time? Craig Berube and Brad Treliving must be pretty special talent evaluators to assess Quillan in such limited minutes.

Yes, Quillan did get burned on the Lightning’s second goal of the night. That is just a fact: he lost the draw and lost his man—the goal-scorer—in coverage. But let’s rewind the sequence a little bit. Quillan went out for a defensive-zone faceoff one whistle beforehand, with his linemates, Lorentz and Jarnkrok, as well as Simon Benoit and Troy Stecher (a great start there, to be sure). He won the faceoff cleanly, but Benoit immediately iced it for no reason, in part because he was playing the Leafs‘ no-tape-to-tape-passes-allowed breakout system. Then, Tampa Bay smartly sent out its top line immediately after the icing. Quillan lost the draw, and it was 2-1.

This isn’t absolving Quillan of blame. He made a bad play, and if we go all the way back to preseason, he did it then, too (in Ottawa), and it was something we flagged for improvement (i.e., don’t lose your man after losing a defensive-zone draw). But how is the coaching staff positioning the player to succeed? With bad linemates, a bad defensive pairing, and bad deployment, Quillan ultimately got beaten on a goal and benched. John Tavares took a shift for him to start the second period. 

Is the hope here that Quillan is the next David Kampf? That’s how the coaching staff is deploying him so far. We just watched Scott Laughton play in this role, struggle to produce, and his play sank like a stone before the egg splatted on Treliving’s face this week with the tepid return on an asset he paid a first and a prospect for a year ago. Tonight, Laughton scored in his first game in LA and played more on the power play than he did this entire season with the Leafs — a Leafs’ power play that was dead last in the league some three months into this campaign. 

Give Quillan some real linemates and ice time, and let’s see what he can do. The Leafs aren’t even giving this kid a chance, which is also ironic, given the Fraser Minten conversations in the market. Based on everything we’ve seen from this staff, Minten would have been treated the exact same way and likely would’ve suffered the same fate. 

Similarly, Alex Steeves became a full-time NHLer elsewhere after ripping up the AHL in Toronto. Right now, the Leafs have another similar story developing: Bo Groulx leads the entire AHL in five-on-five points and is tied for second in the league in goals. Are we going to keep watching a bunch of players who won’t be on the team next season, rather than finding out whether Groulx could be? 

The argument isn’t even about changing the lines, promoting some Marlies, and maybe the team can finally win some games. It’s that we know this lineup is not it, and it’s full of players who should not return next season. The Leafs need to spend these remaining games experimenting and finding out if there is anything to build on for next season.

Is Groulx a player who can push his way into the mix moving forward? Is Quillan a viable NHL center, perhaps even a potential 3C? He should be pushing to play 15 minutes per night right now unless he clearly demonstrates he’s in over his head. He’s not demonstrating anything either way when he sees strictly defensive-zone draws with Lorentz and Jarnkrok in what ultimately amounted to 8:44 of ice time.

On defense, do we really need to watch a revolving cast of Benoit-Stecher-Myers on the third pairing rather than Marlies such as Henry Thrun or William Villeneuve at this point? Again, maybe those two can’t cut it. But let’s learn that unequivocally and proceed from there, rather than watching whatever this is right now for 18 more games.

The Leafs have two regulation wins in their last 20 games — a quarter-season worth of hockey. They are on a seven-game losing streak. The last time this happened in Toronto, here was their roster:

Toronto’s lineup the last time they lost 7 in a row:

van Riemsdyk-Bozak-Kessel
Lupul-McKegg-Booth
Panik-Komarov-Kozun
Lindstrom-Carrick-Bailey

Brewer-Phaneuf
Gardiner-Rielly
MacWilliam-Erixon

Bernier
Reimer

— Kevin Papetti (@KPapetti) March 8, 2026

We can say a lot of things about the current roster, but it is nowhere near as bad as the lineup above, and yet here we are. 

It’s clear as day that the coaching staff has completely lost the room and hasn’t had a clue what they’re doing for quite some time. Frankly, even that part might be acceptable at this point, as a backward attempt to tank and retain their draft pick. But not like this, wherein we’re watching the same veteran-laden group and roughly the same mediocre lineup night after night. The team is losing handily and in an embarrassing fashion, while learning absolutely nothing for the future.

In our post-deadline podcast, we asked the question, what’s the point of these final 19 games? Is it to watch this exact group play night after night, without even attempting to find out whether there are a few players in the system capable of contributing moving forward? 

It’s almost impressive how much of a circus this has become at this point. At least Easton Cowan is finally playing some minutes, though. 

Game Flow: 5v5 Shot Attempts

Heat Map: 5v5 Shot Attempts

Game Highlights: Lightning 5 vs. Maple Leafs 2