BOSTON — When Brendan Shanahan took over the Toronto Maple Leafs’ hockey operations department a decade ago, he felt he needed to eliminate the organization’s tendency to take “shortcuts.”
The Leafs he inherited were famous for chasing trends rather than trying to establish them. For continually shifting course whenever the wind blew them in another direction. For being good enough to just miss the playoffs every spring but never bad enough to draft and accumulate game-breaking talent.
The guiding principle behind what became known as the “Shanaplan” was really just establishing a culture in which process was valued over results. “The challenge here in Toronto is not to come up with the plan; the challenge in Toronto is to stick to it,” Shanahan famously said in April 2015.
When judged by that original objective, his time as team president should be viewed as a success. They certainly haven’t wavered.
Except as we sit here now, with the Leafs having lost an eighth playoff series in nine tries under Shanahan after being dispatched in another Game 7 overtime heartbreaker by the Boston Bruins, it feels well past time for the results to start dictating a shift in the overarching approach.
Sure, you could find all kinds of ways to twist the particulars of a best-of-seven that was bookended by Saturday night losses at TD Garden and featured a strange run of injuries into some form of “yeah, but” defense of the Leafs program. But the fact remains that they were again one shot away from moving on and saw that shot fired into their net. They dropped another two playoff games on home ice along the way, making them 2-8 at Scotiabank Arena in the last two springs, and they blew a 1-0, third-period lead in Game 7 for good measure.
“It’s very evident that when teams play the Leafs, they set up the game for the Leafs to beat themselves,” said head coach Sheldon Keefe.
No matter how close it ends up looking in the end, they always do.
This remains a group that hasn’t been anywhere near a lengthy playoff run. A team requires 16 wins in one playoff spring to lift the Stanley Cup, and you’d need to combine the past five Leafs postseasons to count up that many victories.
They were a young group when they lost to Washington in 2017 and then dropped consecutive seven-game series to Boston the following two springs. After Game 7 in 2019, then-coach Mike Babcock said, “I think we’re really taking steps and going in the right direction, but we’ve got to push through and get through this.”
Five years on, they still haven’t found their way.
It was a familiar solemn walk to the bus Saturday night for the veterans on the third floor at TD Garden. Some munched on pizza after another energy-sapping, soul-crushing loss. They all wore long blank stares while no doubt replaying the vision of David Pastrnak freezing the clock in overtime on a Bruins set play that caught their defenders off guard.
“I mean, this is as tight of a group as I’ve been a part of here,” said Auston Matthews. “And I feel like we say that every year, but I mean, it truly was an incredible group. Incredibly tight.”
“Look I don’t think there’s an issue with the core,” added William Nylander, who scored the final three Toronto goals of the season. “I think we were f—ing right there all series. We battled hard and got to Game 7 and OT. It’s a s–tty feeling.”
All these years on and with so little collective playoff success, these Leafs are carrying deep scars and a considerable amount of baggage and self-doubt.
The latest loss to Boston should be viewed as a step in the wrong direction from the ones that came before it, even when factoring in that Matthews was limited in three games and sat out two others entirely because of illness and injury, and that Nylander missed the opening three games of the series with an eye migraine issue.
That’s part of the risk you run when building a program that sees half of the available…
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