TORONTO — The Toronto Maple Leafs became sellers leading up to the\u00a0NHL Trade Deadline for the first time in a decade this week.<\/p>\n
And if there is any blame to go around for the team being in that position, general manager Brad Treliving said, \u201cIt starts with me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI take responsibility for our season,\u201d Treliving said Friday, about 90 minutes after the 3 p.m. ET deadline had passed. \u201cI don\u2019t look at today being an autopsy day. We still have 19 games to go. But I think there are a whole host of reasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll take responsibility. You know, we met earlier in the year, [at] about the 20-game mark, where we got off to a slow start. And again, the failures start with me. Once we get through the end of the season, you know, there will be all sorts of evaluation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Given that the Maple Leafs are just 10 months removed from taking the eventual Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers to seven games in their best-of-7 Eastern Conference Second Round series, there will be no shortage of questions regarding what went wrong for a franchise that entered 2025-26 with Stanley Cup aspirations.<\/p>\n
To that end, a season of aspiration quickly became one of frustration for Toronto (27-25-11), which is eight points behind the Boston Bruins for the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs from the Eastern Conference.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With the team on an 0-4-2 skid since the three-week break for the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, the decision was made to trade away player assets for draft capital. As such, forwards Bobby McMann<\/a>, Scott Laughton<\/a> and Nicolas Roy<\/a> were dealt in separate trades that netted Toronto a total of five picks.<\/p>\n It was a scenario that Maple Leafs fans had not seen in 10 years.<\/p>\n In the weeks leading up to the 2016 NHL Trade Deadline, then-GM Lou Lamoriello shipped out names like Dion Phaneuf<\/a>, Roman Polak<\/a>, Nick Spaling<\/a>, James Reimer<\/a>, Shawn Matthias<\/a> and Daniel Winnik<\/a> for six picks sprinkled over the next three drafts — four second-round selections and two fourth-round choices. Less than four months later, Toronto took forward Auston Matthews<\/a>\u00a0No. 1 in the 2016 NHL Draft, sparking a run that saw the Maple Leafs reach the playoffs for nine consecutive seasons.<\/p>\n With a 10th straight appearance seeming improbable at this point, Treliving was asked why he thinks Craig Berube, in his second season behind the Maple Leafs bench, still is the right coach for this team.<\/p>\n \u201cLike everything else, we all take responsibility,\u201d he said. \u201cI think Craig\u2019s a terrific coach. It hasn\u2019t worked, right? So when it doesn\u2019t work, we all share a blame and we all share responsibility, right? So it starts with myself. It\u2019s the coaches. It\u2019s the players. We all are partners in this thing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TORONTO — The Toronto Maple Leafs became sellers leading up to the\u00a0NHL Trade Deadline for the first time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194291],"tags":[49,48,3302],"class_list":["post-519430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}