odds remain fairly high (58.2 percent)<\/a> that the Leafs will slip to sixth or seventh and lose that selection to the Boston Bruins.<\/p>\nStill, it\u2019s far better than where they came from. And it\u2019s not really a deserved tank given how haphazardly the Leafs have gone about things.<\/p>\n
When the Leafs\u2019 playoff hopes seemed to finally be over, after three consecutive losses out of the Olympic break, getting to the NHL\u2019s bottom five looked all but impossible. Even after a brutal 4-9-2 skid at that point, Toronto was still firmly in the mushy middle, with a 12-point lead over teams such as the St. Louis Blues in the NHL\u2019s real basement.<\/p>\n
The Leafs also didn\u2019t have a deep selloff at the trade deadline, moving out only three depth forwards (Nicolas Roy, Scott Laughton and Bobby McMann), and didn\u2019t shut down many players due to injury. They also had a general manager who was about to be fired and a coach who had no interest in leaning into the losing (and no one to tell him his job might depend on it).<\/p>\n
This was not a franchise well set up to plan a freefall \u2014 or to plan really much of anything. Rather than shutting players down and going kid-heavy in early March, as the Florida Panthers did, the Leafs mostly just went heavy on their veterans.<\/p>\n
Goaltender Joseph Woll started again and again. William Nylander and John Tavares piled up more than a point a game while playing more than 21 and 19 minutes a night, respectively. Aging defencemen such as Jake McCabe and Oliver Ekman-Larsson were played into the ground, too.<\/p>\n
All this while young prospects called up from the Toronto Marlies sat in the press box or warming the bench, watching it all unfold.<\/p>\n
At least some of them had to be wondering, like we were, why this was happening. Why call AHL players up who have never played in the NHL only to have them sit in the press box as soon-to-be-out-of-the-league Calle Jarnkrok and friends skate a regular shift every game? Did anyone in the Leafs organization notice how many of the teams they faced, especially those at the bottom of the standings, were on a different program, with the likes of Star Wars-named Wilmer Skoog skating 16 minutes against them?<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, there were multiple games in which Toronto call-ups Ryan Tverberg and Jacob Quillan played eight or nine sheltered minutes as Craig Berube pulled his goalie with five minutes to play and called timeouts to stack his lines in an attempt to win.<\/p>\n
If the Leafs have had any good fortune this season, it\u2019s that those attempts haven\u2019t worked that well. They\u2019re a putrid 5-11-5 since March 1, better than only Vancouver and Seattle. Teams such as the Blues have rocketed past them the last six weeks, allowing Toronto to settle into the fact that it\u2019s at least semi-realistic the organization will have a top-five selection in one of the deepest drafts at those slots in a while.<\/p>\n
Getting a high-impact young player out of this disaster of a season would be massive for whoever slots into the GM chair next. That player could even make an impact as soon as next season, the way Ben Kindel \u2014 drafted No. 11 last June \u2014 has, scoring 17 goals this season for Pittsburgh as the Penguins retool has taken flight and quickly returned them to the postseason.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s also hard not to think about what could have been different had a more cogent plan been put in place after the deadline. Toronto currently sits just three points ahead on the Calgary Flames and New York Rangers in third and fourth last, respectively, which are spots Toronto could have occupied had one or two more of those regulation losses been in overtime and one or two more of those OTLs been in regulation.<\/p>\n
Did they really need to beat playoff-bound Anaheim (twice?!), Minnesota and Boston in March, playing their veterans into the ground? Did they need to win that game over the Rangers three weeks ago, a four-point swing that would alone have slipped Toronto down into 29th, a position where the Leafs would have a 19 percent chance of a top two pick and 80 percent chance of keeping their selection?<\/p>\n
Would it really have been that hard to be a little bit worse, avoiding an inexplicable 5-3-2 stretch in mid-March when there was absolutely nothing to play for?<\/p>\n
The answer, for this franchise, is obviously yes. It\u2019s always hard to do the right thing \u2014 even when that means losing many games. The 2025-26 team\u2019s strength was apparently playing poorly when it didn\u2019t want to and then being better when it didn\u2019t matter anymore.<\/p>\n
Now we await the results of Wednesday\u2019s game against the Senators and the bouncing lottery balls to see if the hockey gods smile on the Leafs. If they don\u2019t, well, at least we\u2019ll always have those lovely, unwanted wins in March 2026 to look back on fondly while a top prospect plays for a division rival the next two decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They\u2019re doing it. Somehow, against all odds, the Toronto Maple Leafs are losing just enough games to sink…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99,1788],"class_list":["post-583914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports","tag-toronto-maple-leafs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}