TORONTO — If you attended the ugly game on Monday night between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Philadelphia Flyers, you probably had some existential questions about the whole endeavor.
1. Why am I here, among these empty seats and a surprising number of orange jerseys?
2. What exactly am I cheering for?
To recap: The Leafs playoff chances have gone *poof* in the week since the Olympic break, with three horrible losses in a row. A fourth, albeit in a 3-2 shootout, on Monday didn’t really move the needle in the standings, but it did offer potential signs of things to come.
Toronto looked a lot better than it has of late, playing with some uncharacteristic passion and puck possession, impressing the Deserve To Win O’Meter more than we’ve seen in most games this season. Overall, the game had the feel of a potential building block night for a team that has just two regulation wins in its last 17 games.
“I think today was a step in the right direction and that’s what we want to keep building off,” William Nylander said postgame.
The problem is the Leafs have already missed their window to turn their season around. The likelihood they will make the playoffs is now just 3 percent; the chance they will get a top five draft pick are up to 11 percent. Everything outside of those two numbers — the remaining 86 percent — means giving a good pick (between sixth and 16th overall) to the division rival Boston Bruins.
With 21 games left to play, the final quarter of this miserable season is going to be about two things: What can they ship out and acquire by Friday’s trade deadline?
And how much can they increase their draft lottery odds, with a pile of losses?
On the first question, our own Chris Johnston has set the over-under on Leafs players traded at three-and-a-half, which isn’t particularly encouraging for anyone hoping for a mass exodus. Toronto has four pending UFAs to deal as rentals — Bobby McMann, Scott Laughton, Troy Stecher and Calle Jarnkrok — which should be the bare minimum of what they accomplish on the market over the next four days.
The lottery odds, meanwhile, are going to bear watching, regardless of who stays and goes. After picking up the lone point against the Flyers, the Leafs moved up to 23rd place in the league — or 10th last — a position that comes with 7.3 percent odds of winning the draft lottery and getting a top three pick (3.5 percent for first pick, 3.7 percent for second and 0.1 percent for third).
The Leafs are now nine points up on the Flames and Blackhawks in the bottom five, which is going to be an incredibly difficult gap to close given the selloffs coming in Calgary and Chicago, which the Blackhawks started by sending Connor Murphy to the Oilers on Monday afternoon. Those teams are on pace for just 75 points and they’re about to get worse; Toronto has already banked 64 points, meaning they’d have to be historically awful the rest of the way to limbo under that mark.
Falling further down is possible, however. Toronto is basically tied with the Kings, who added Artemi Panarin and are trying to make a push. Nashville is only two points behind them, and the Predators have been inexplicably good of late. The Devils, who the Leafs face on the road on Wednesday, are four points back and not expected to be big sellers this week. You might even be able to make a case for the Jets to catch Toronto, given they have two games in hand and Connor Hellebuyck in net.
A drop from 10th last to sixth last would more than double the Leafs lottery odds up to 15.4 percent, with a 7.5 percent chance of getting the first overall pick and a 7.7 percent chance of picking second. That’s still a long shot but then again, the Islanders had just a 3.5 percent chance of getting the first overall pick last offseason and somehow ended up with a franchise-altering superstar in Matthew Schaefer.
A one-in-seven shot of this disastrous season turning into a player like that for the Leafs would be something.
What’s amazing about where the Leafs are now is their record could have been a lot worse. For a 13-game stretch in late December and the first half of January, they rattled off an impressive 9-1-3 record, beating some good teams along the way.
At the time, it felt like a run that saved their season — and coach Craig Berube’s job. In hindsight, it merely forced them into this awful no man’s land, where the most likely outcome by far is forfeiting another great asset to a Boston team that’s benefitted from Toronto’s managerial misfires many times over (Tuukka Rask, Tyler Seguin, Dougie Hamilton, Fraser Minten, etc.).
If you take those 13 games out of the equation, however, the Leafs record in the remaining 48 is just 18-23-7, the equivalent of a 73-point pace over a full season. Only the last-place Canucks and second-to-last Blues are worse than that on the year.
The Leafs have, in other words, been one of the very worst teams in the NHL for the majority of the campaign. All they need to do is live that identity the rest of the way, both at the deadline in moving on from their UFAs and some of the dead wood on the roster, and in terms of playing young players more while shutting down veterans who are nursing injuries.
There could be a silver lining here if they can add some draft picks and prospects in trades, get better looks at Easton Cowan and some of the Marlies in meaningful minutes, and also improve their lottery odds. It’s what the Bruins did last year, when they won just three of their final 16 games (3-11-2) en route to finishing fifth last and ultimately getting a great young player (James Hagens) with the seventh pick after the lottery.
The Leafs path is obviously complicated by only having their pick if its in the top five, but that whiff by the front office is spilled milk. At the end of the day, you’d rather have the better lottery odds and potentially give Boston a slightly higher selection than try to win more of these meaningless games down the stretch.
So embrace the tank. Be bad. And just maybe you’ll get lucky.
You’ve been doing it by accident much of the year anyway, so it shouldn’t be that hard.