The Toronto Maple Leafs have not missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs since the 2015-16 season – a year so miserable it culminated with the franchise winning the draft lottery and selecting Auston Matthews with the first-overall pick.

Since then, Toronto has been as reliable as any team in the NHL at taking care of business in the regular season.

That has not been the case this season. Watching this year’s version of the Maple Leafs has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. How blame is apportioned for this year’s grim season is going to be subject to debate for months to come.

Some will look at the deterioration in top-end talent, be it the loss of Mitch Marner to the Vegas Golden Knights or the scoring slowdown from players like Matthews. Others will look towards the roster construction effort by the front office, including the performance from the depth players on the lineup.

Simply put, everything is on the table for this season’s postmortem.

To that end, I wonder what head coach Craig Berube’s fate will be. Berube is an impressively accomplished coach, but his calling card – and the key reason he was brought in by the Maple Leafs organization – was to shore up this team on the defensive end of the ice.

Perhaps the front office didn’t give him the requisite players to fortify the defence; perhaps there really is an engagement or buy-in issue with the players. But one thing is for sure, Toronto’s defensive play has only deteriorated under Berube, the exact opposite of what was expected:

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You’ll notice expected goal rates surged this year along with real goals conceded, and that’s important context. It’s easy to look at the play of the Maple Leafs goaltending year-over-year and point to their performance as the reason for Toronto’s struggles. One year ago, Anthony Stolarz and Joseph Woll were among the best tandems in the NHL, stopping 48 goals better than expected over the course of the year. It’s hard to see poor defence when your goaltender room is playing like that.

But Toronto’s goaltending has been solid this year, too. Stolarz may have taken a step back, but the combination of Woll and Dennis Hildeby have stopped 29 goals more than expected, carrying a 90.7 per cent stop rate in the process. The problem, of course, is they are facing many more shots and from more dangerous areas of the ice. That will simply lead to more goals.

Consider this year’s heat maps (via HockeyViz): of where Maple Leafs goaltenders are seeing shots. At both even strength and on the penalty kill, it’s a lot of volume from the circles and the low slot, areas where shooting percentages surge:

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As it stands, with just a couple of weeks left in the season, the Maple Leafs are 30th in the league in goals against per 60 minutes (3.4), ahead of only the Vancouver Canucks and San Jose Sharks – one team eyeing the first-overall pick in the draft lottery, the other among the youngest teams in the league and still filling out its roster.

For an organization that had championship aspirations, this season has been a difficult pill to swallow. There will be feverish debate about how to return this team to contention status going forward, but understanding structurally why this team has become such a defensive sieve should be at the top of the analysis list.

You simply cannot be a contender in the modern NHL with a defence this porous, and it’s the reason Toronto is going to be on the outside looking in come Game 83.

Data via Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference, Hockey Viz