Doubt we miss, but I wouldn't put any money down on getting past the first round either.
It has been a frustrating road. I've enjoyed the regular season hockey, for the most part, but I'm getting tired of watching this team fade every spring.
It's frustrating, because the talent level of Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews is so high, it's so easy, as a fan, to be blinded and refuse to believe that these guys just can't get it done.
I think, for Leaf fans, there's also an element of being gun-shy in terms of "moving on" from players because the Leafs have famously made horrible decisions in this regard in the past.
The Leafs traded Larry Murphy for Future Considerations and he immediately became a top-pair defender on back-to-back Cup Champion teams and played five more years in the league.
The Leafs dumped Phil Kessel for a light return and even retained salary and then watched him also win back-to-back Cups and posting 45 points in those two playoffs.
The Leafs also decided that they couldn't win with Nazem Kadri and he had to be sent out of town. His first year in Colorado, he had 18 points in the playoffs. In ten years with the Maple Leafs, he had only managed 10 career playoff points. In his third year with Colorado, Kadri won a Cup (and racked up another 15 playoff points.)
Getting burned, this badly, this often, has made a lot of Maple Leaf fans very wary of cutting ties with chronic post-season underachievers.
I still, personally, believe that Auston Matthews could deliver in the playoffs (though I certainly have concerns about his shot this season), but I've seen enough of Mitch Marner to know that his lack of compete and lack of courage means he's not built for playoff hockey. I think, much like the Bruins moving on from Joe Thornton many years ago, Mitch Marner leaving town could be addition by subtraction.
The Bruins return for Thornton was historically bad, but without getting him off the books, the Bruins can't sign Chara that off-season and without Chara, there's no Cup for the Bruins in 2011 and the team doesn't spend a decade as an upper echelon team.