Winning isn’t everything here

Leafs’ brass pat themselves on the back for progress after sixth straight first-round exit

It’s moments like this when the Maple Leafs miss an uncompromising presence like Tim Leiweke. The former CEO, in a 2 ⁄ -year run 1

2 at the helm of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment that began in 2013, was widely credited with bringing a winning-is-everything ethic to the profit-above-all ethos of Toronto sports.

“We’ve got to be like New York and L.A., where we do not tolerate losing,” Leiweke said of Toronto.

If Leiweke were still MLSE CEO — he’s in the arena management and development business now — here’s guessing he would have tuned into Tuesday’s state-of-thefranchise address from Brendan Shanahan and burst a blood vessel. More than eight years after Leiweke hired Shanahan to great fanfare, Shanahan has yet to win so much as a playoff series. And yet, on Tuesday, the president wasn’t exactly a picture of angst-ridden urgency, refusing to tolerate another in a long line of losses.

To the contrary, Shanahan calmly rationalized another playoff defeat while offering strong votes of confidence to general manager Kyle Dubas and head coach Sheldon Keefe. If you didn’t know any better, you could have been convinced the Leafs had just won something. If you didn’t know any better, you could have been convinced Shanahan doesn’t actually answer to a boss.

And maybe he doesn’t. With MLSE’s permanent CEO job currently vacant while a search firm scours the globe for potential candidates to replace Leiweke’s mostly anonymous successor, it’s hard to know how MLSE’s multi-pronged ownership will view the situation. Nobody’s happy, one assumes. But the members of the board have generally bought what Shanahan sells.

Which is to say: There’s nobody currently on the board with the thrust of Leiweke, who always talked and acted like a little bit of organizational impatience, a nowor-never outlook to every season, was essential to success. One of Leiweke’s hires and proteges, Raptors GM Masai Ujiri, shared Leiweke’s win-at-all-costs view and delivered a championship.

As for Shanahan? Let’s just say Tuesday’s post-mortem wasn’t a grim funeral, appropriately throwing dirt on the unacceptability of an organization with the deepest resources in the sport losing in the first round of the playoffs for the sixth straight season. This was a cheery celebration of life, with the guys in charge looking on the bright side of one of the most improbable streaks of big-moment underperformance in pro sports.

They didn’t come to mourn another devastating loss — a fifth straight defeat in opening-round, winner-take-all playoff games, a record unmatched in the NHL, NBA or Major League Baseball. They came to pat each other on the back for their parts in making this particular demise, to the Tampa Bay Lightning in seven games, somehow more dignified.

“We are proud of the progress that was made during the year,” Dubas said. Progress? As Leiweke might have pointed out: Sports is a uniquely binary business. You win or you don’t. And the Maple Leafs never seem to.

“Our team is evolving,” Keefe insisted.

Perhaps the coach is talking about evolution in the Darwinian sense. Like, give them another millennium and they’ll grow actual teeth. Until further notice, though, they’re a species unchanged. In the eat-or-be-eaten jungle of the NHL, they’re prey.

Dubas said he was heartened that his team wasn’t “passive” in big moments. Shanahan said this year they played on their toes, when in previous years they were back on their “heels.”

And now we were at the point where the management was handing out style points on belly flops. Toes or heels, another season ended up six feet under far too soon. Still, Shanahan said he was thrilled with his team’s “fight,” acknowledging “fight” was a new thing for this group.

Only in Toronto does something that ought to be a bare-minimum expectation get a badge of honour from the president. The pandemic may be waning, but Blue and White Disease is raging.

Shanahan, of course, not-so-subtly suggested that it’s the market that’s delusional, seeking to preemptively quiet demands for turnover from the peanut gallery.

“We will not be making changes just simply for the sake of making changes,” he said.

And why would he? He’s an expert at insisting something is different when it’s exactly the same.

Sure, there was the oft-cited 115point regular season. But in the stratified NHL standings, where there were distinct haves and havenots, it’s worth pointing out that the best record in Leafs history was only the fourth-best in the league, and that no less than eight teams in the Eastern Conference reeled off 100point years.

And sure, there was a playoff loss to a very good team. But the Lightning were a diminished and exhausted unit. Toronto blew chances to take a stranglehold on the series in Games 2 and 4, the latter a fullroster no-show. And the Leafs squandered two kicks at closing out the series in Games 6 and 7, while their power-play went missing and their vaunted scoring touch with it. In other words, just as they choked up three chances to put away the inferior Canadiens a season ago, the song remains the same. The only thing the Leafs lack is the most important thing: the know-how to win big games.

“We’re still seeking that killer instinct,” Shanahan said.

Which was one of the rare acknowledgments of the difficult reality. Shanahan lamented the lack of “killer instinct” a year ago, and neither the acquisition of a worldclass sports psychologist nor a handful of roster tweaks could crack the code. Which suggests it’s endemic to the current group.

A year after Dubas staunchly insisted on keeping the core group together, he at least didn’t close the door on moving a significant piece. But almost every other bit of messaging on Tuesday reeked of a strange self-satisfaction.

Here’s guessing Leiweke would have fired somebody, maybe everybody, maybe a year ago. On Tuesday, nobody in Leafland seemed to be looking over their shoulder. At one point Shanahan and Dubas were asked if the team’s inability to close had put a strain on their relationship. The pair smiled and laughed.

“As much as winning can bring people together, learning how to deal with the heartbreak and devastation … can bring you close together as well,” Shanahan said.

In that moment, here’s what a savvy CEO like Leiweke would have asked himself: Is it possible these guys are too close — so close they can’t see the forest through the trees? Maybe a fresh set of eyes would go a long way toward challenging the in-house vision, or lack thereof.

‘‘ We will not be making changes just simply for the sake of making changes.

BRENDAN SHANAHAN

Brendan Shanahan, left, and Kyle Dubas smiled and laughed when asked if the Leafs’ annual first-round exits had put a strain on their relationship. “As much as winning can bring people together, learning how to deal with the heartbreak and devastation … can bring you close together as well,” Shanahan said.