Confirmed with Link: Shanahan, Dubas, Keefe all staying

[LilySmoov]

It is the coaches job to plan and train the players to executive. Did the Leafs executive their plans from the get go? Did the players played up to their standards?
Unless you think it is all on the players than what’s the point of even having a coach behind the bench?

So again, how do you demonstrate whether the coach is responsible? And assuming insufficient motivation is even the problem (which you've not shown), what specifically is your proposed solution? Professional psychotherapists can struggle providing sufficient motivation to individuals, so why do you think it's even reasonable to expect a hockey coach to be able to do that for entire, varied groups of people all at the same time during a period of high pressure with an extremely short and tight deadline? Like what kind of amazing powers do you think coaches have?

And again, I really want to emphasize: how do you demonstrate the coach was even the problem? What happens if both teams are sufficiently motivated? Eventually someone has to lose. Doesn't mean they weren't motivated. And this is without even getting into the sport's inherent randomness, unpredictability and other external factors that might impact the outcome.

 

[Confucius]

Leafs are a pretty medicore franchise so our records aren't that impressive

115 pts while amazing didn't win us the division, conference nor president trophy if your into that type of success

Most of the records were with AM34 who had a incredible year

We didn't rebuild though to have regular season successes and sustained playoff failure. It was supposed to be be a good/strong regular season team and then win multiple cups come playoffs.

Taking Tampa to 7 means nothing when we already took Boston to 7 in 2019 in a series we outplayed them similarly to this year vs the Bolts

The leafs have repeatedly shown they choke and don't finish their opportunities in the final 2 or 3 games of a series where they can close out a team.

We defend worse, make bad decisions and reads, miss our chances, and are generally good for gaffes which cost us directly (galchenyuk, sandins 2/dermott, kerfoot drop pass/penalties, bad defensive coverage on both Paul's goals in game 7).

They don't have the mix if depth players who can step up and be a hero like a Talbot, Paul etc.

The big time players haven't shown up all as a unit in 4 do or die games.

Very hard to believe anything else to be the case in game 7 next year.

We need a depth piece/support player who can score when the top guys are hounded and not capable of providing us with offense


Not it does not work like that. Many teams didn't play Tampa so they didn't get a chance to go the full length

And going game 7 in round 1 is our hobby. We do it irregardless if we're playing a dynasty, an elite power house (Boston years) or two medicore squads ( CBJ, and MTL)

Leafs will play the same tampa/boston/flordia most likely next year in round 1. If the core+depth+coaching enters with the same mentality as they had in games 4 and 7 of Tampa well be losing our 7th straight 1st round series in the AM34 era

The teams that didn’t get to play Tampa must have lost to an inferior team. The round doesn’t matter it’s who you beat or who beats you. So far nobody has done as well as the Leafs. Now if the Avs wIN it’s a different story

 

[Apex Predator]

The teams that didn’t get to play Tampa must have lost to an inferior team. The round doesn’t matter it’s who you beat or who beats you. So far nobody has done as well as the Leafs. Now if the Avs wIN it’s a different story

If the avs sim people will just say the Leafs were the third best team.

 

[Morbo]

Yes I have seen that……this year is also included in my 4 decades

Good so you agree you haven't seen it before this year then.

because, well, it never happened before.

 

[Confucius]

If the avs sim people will just say the Leafs were the third best team.

No because anybody the Avs beat could have possibly beat the leafs as well or anybody in the west.

 

[Nineteen67]

So again, how do you demonstrate whether the coach is responsible? And assuming insufficient motivation is even the problem (which you've not shown), what specifically is your proposed solution? Professional psychotherapists can struggle providing sufficient motivation to individuals, so why do you think it's even reasonable to expect a hockey coach to be able to do that for entire, varied groups of people all at the same time during a period of high pressure with an extremely short and tight deadline? Like what kind of amazing powers do you think coaches have?

And again, I really want to emphasize: how do you demonstrate the coach was even the problem? What happens if both teams are sufficiently motivated? Eventually someone has to lose. Doesn't mean they weren't motivated. And this is without even getting into the sport's inherent randomness, unpredictability and other external factors that might impact the outcome.

Have you seen their PP the last three playoffs

 

[LilySmoov]

Have you seen their PP the last three playoffs

Oh yeah the PP was grossly ineffective, and I'd actually argue, given how close the Tampa series was, could very well have been the biggest factor in our loss all things considered. But how involved is Keefe in the powerplay anyway? Is that not Carbery's job? If you wanna argue we need a new special teams coach 'cause they were stifled by a great penalty kill over the course of a 7 game sample size (and that's without even looking at any of the underlying stats), I'd maybe tell you to not overreact, but even still, that's a wildly different argument than "Keefe didn't get them to execute." Somehow he got them to execute at even strength, but they just forgot all his motivational speeches when they had a powerplay?

 

[Gabriel426]

So again, how do you demonstrate whether the coach is responsible? And assuming insufficient motivation is even the problem (which you've not shown), what specifically is your proposed solution? Professional psychotherapists can struggle providing sufficient motivation to individuals, so why do you think it's even reasonable to expect a hockey coach to be able to do that for entire, varied groups of people all at the same time during a period of high pressure with an extremely short and tight deadline? Like what kind of amazing powers do you think coaches have?

And again, I really want to emphasize: how do you demonstrate the coach was even the problem? What happens if both teams are sufficiently motivated? Eventually someone has to lose. Doesn't mean they weren't motivated. And this is without even getting into the sport's inherent randomness, unpredictability and other external factors that might impact the outcome.

It is quite simple, Keefe’s team lost again.

If Keefe had done everything at best he could and the team still loses, it means his best is not good enough to be the coach for the Leafs.
If he hadn’t done everything and the team loses, he should not be around bc it means either he can’t do it or he doesn’t want to do it.

Just to name a few of Keefe’s shortcoming.
Playing Jumbo despite him being a step or two behind.
Playing AJ when he hasn’t play for months.
Playing Holl and benching Lilly.

Masai fired Casey despite him being Coach of the Year bc Masai believed Casey can’t coach his team to a Championship after failing to advance a few years in a row despite having home court advantage….

 

[Dreakmur]

My opinion is never "cloaked". There is no need to incorrectly guess what my opinion is. If you're unsure, then you're welcome to ask or move on, but spreading lies about me is not acceptable.

What's the lie? You're going to support everything that Dubas does, regardless of whatever gymnastics you have to perform.

That is a different premise. Relevant experience can assist one in their job, but playing in the NHL is very obviously not a requirement to "know what it takes to win".

As usual, you're arguing against a point I never made. I didn't say experience was required to do a good job, but I did say that lacking it made it much more difficult.

Of course not. Playoff predictions very obviously do not encompass the entirety of one's opinion. That's what I've been saying to you all along.
You are wrong here because the things you are saying here are wrong, not because you were wrong with your playoff predictions.

You're being shocked that the Leafs lost is just tied into your consistent wrongness.

Despite what you may think, a player's proficiency on the PP is something that factors into contracts. You can't just completely ignore it (and a lot of other relevant information) to try and justify an incorrect position.

Again, arguing against a point I didn't make. You're doing great!

Since you brought this up, Pastrnak is actually the only one of the two that played on a top PP unit prior to signing.

He did a lot with the extra 30 seconds a game I guess.

Not sure the relevance, but pretty even throughout.

You really don't understand the relevance?

 

[Willchel Marlynder]

well no, you hadn't seen either a 115 point team or a 60 goal scorer before. that's kinda the point.

He also hasn't seen a Stanley Cup! Don't leave that out

 

[Willchel Marlynder]

On the other hand, some of you never tasted being a bottom feeder who couldn't sniff the playoffs. This is not a team you blow up. It's a team you go all in on.

How do you think we got Matthews, Marner, Nylander, Rielly, etc? We didn't get them with outstanding playoff success I'll tell you that. Being a bottom feeders and hitting on the top picks is the only thing this franchise has succeeded masterfully at in the past 10 years.

 

[LilySmoov]

It is quite simple, Keefe’s team lost again.

If Keefe had done everything at best he could and the team still loses, it means his best is not good enough to be the coach for the Leafs.

If he hadn’t done everything and the team loses, he should not be around bc it means either he can’t do it or he doesn’t want to do it.

It's quite simple, that's an embarrassingly simplistic and logically fallacious argument. The implication here is poor coaching is the only reason teams ever lose. You understand that right? Your entire argument is "Team lost, therefore coach bad" and it was obvious that was gonna be it from the start, which is why I asked, what if both teams are sufficiently motivated? What if two equally motivated teams (assuming you can reliably identify such a thing, which you can't and, in a roundabout way, admitted) play each other? Since there are, by your own admission no other factors that could contribute to a loss, how does the game end? Can it even end? Do they play infinite overtimes? Are infinite overtimes even metaphysically possible? Does this imply that a literal temporal infinity exists? What about the problem of infinite regression? How does your argument resolve this?

Just to name a few of Keefe’s shortcoming.
Playing Jumbo despite him being a step or two behind.
Playing AJ when he hasn’t play for months.
Playing Holl and benching Lilly.

Masai fired Casey despite him being Coach of the Year bc Masai believed Casey can’t coach his team to a Championship after failing to advance a few years in a row despite having home court advantage….

Keefe has made some missteps, no one is arguing otherwise. "Keefe made missteps" is not however the argument you're making. Keefe's missteps have literally nothing to do with his purported inability to properly motivate his players.

 

[ReHabs]

Teams that make 'all the right moves' find success. I agree that Dubas has built a pretty good team, not a Championship team yet but one that should be able to win a round or two. Keefe is the problem, IMO.

It's not always that good management = Stanley Cup success. Of course they're correlated strongly but exceptions are inevitable due only to the fact that good management does not impact the odds and ends of what happens on the ice. Bad breaks and bad bounces happen.

eg. I thought the Doug Wilson Sharks were very very well run for many years, they only made one final, in 2016, and never won the Cup.

The Leafs are outliers in their lack of success but you have to look at Performance and not just Results. Otherwise you're liable to think Marc Bergevin's Habs were better than Dubas' Leafs -- patently untrue.

The problem is the details and the goal shouldn’t be to put together an exciting and fast team. That bar is very low and it was already mission accomplished in 2016-17.

I’m just a fan observing but I find this management team really struggles with a lot of fairly conventional hockey team building concepts and playoff details.

When they need playoff experience, they get old players without checking their playoff resumes. When they are fighting playoff Game 7 demons they casually play the Tampa series like they want a Game 7. They don’t know how to manage an attrition game. They don’t know where to prioritize size. They draft guys they struggle to promote later because they’re too smart to draft for size or specific roles. They barely lose a playoff series with a $1.65 million goalie duelling the goalie of the era so their response is to go Moneyball again and get cheaper in net.

Do you agree that these criticism, valid as they are, are only a minor part of team building and maintenance? The hardest part is already done.. and for at least the next two years the Leafs have an exceptionally strong and capable core of five exceptionally good players. That's the hardest part and Shanahan and his GMs have done it well.

You can criticize Keefe but he did well this year with the team and I think it's worth keeping him to learn and grow rather than replace him.

Keefe didn’t get the players to perform.
Dubas’s vision of the team he built might not be as good as their records but Indicated since the team had not done anything in the playoffs.

The players performed very well this year, didn't they?

They didn't assemble anything they got gifted the core and over paid them

They kept the core together for a very long time. This is the number one and number two things a GM should do: assemble and retain a core. They did it with success. All the other players are replaceable.

They only get credit if the team has some success otherwise we can really call them a strong core. They may be skilled on an individual basis but together that have achieved nothing of any note yet

They have a lot of success as can be seen by their individual and team stats in the regular season. It doesn't help you or anybody to discount that.

 

[TheRumble]

lmfao.

A Habs fan just came into this thread and outsmarted every single doomer here.

Really illustrates how dumb the Leafs fanbase on HFBoards is.

 

[Racer88]

Good so you agree you haven't seen it before this year then.

because, well, it never happened before.

Of course but I never said I had seen it before this year. I said in 4 decades I had seen it all.

 

[Racer88]

He also hasn't seen a Stanley Cup! Don't leave that out

There ya go……..that’s the only thing. Lol

 

[justashadowof]

Is "doomer" the new dismissive handwave for everyone capable of seeing obvious patterns?

 

[justashadowof]

I had really hoped that this current Leafs' era was something like the 1960's era but in reality it's shaping up to be like the 1970's teams that only aspired to greatness. That 1970's teams were beloved by its loyal fanbase with Hall of Fame level stars but only won one 7-game playoff series during the entire 1970's (as underdogs to a younger better team, the New York Islanders). Crazy fact: the 1980's Leafs' teams won the same number of 7-game playoff series as the 1970's teams plus won another 5-game series.

I vaguely recall hearing about the consolation of respect earned after consecutive sweeps at the hands of the Montreal Canadiens in 1978 and 1979 as that team's era of contention came to a close.

 

[Nineteen67]

Oh yeah the PP was grossly ineffective, and I'd actually argue, given how close the Tampa series was, could very well have been the biggest factor in our loss all things considered. But how involved is Keefe in the powerplay anyway? Is that not Carbery's job? If you wanna argue we need a new special teams coach 'cause they were stifled by a great penalty kill over the course of a 7 game sample size (and that's without even looking at any of the underlying stats), I'd maybe tell you to not overreact, but even still, that's a wildly different argument than "Keefe didn't get them to execute." Somehow he got them to execute at even strength, but they just forgot all his motivational speeches when they had a powerplay?

PP looks the same every year, regardless of who has the title of PP Special teams coach. Rumblings I’ve heard on the radio claim he has lots of input into the PP strategy. Ultimately it‘s his responsibility, so why wouldn't he be involved.

IMO, Getting them to execute is more than just motivating them. It’s figuring out how to beat the opposition and making adjustments in a particular game and in a series.

The Leafs have become an on the job training center - If the President, GM, and players all got a few years to cut their teeth, Keefe may as well get a few himself.

 

[Dekes For Days]

What's the lie? You're going to support everything that Dubas does

As you know, that is the lie. Dubas has nothing to do with my opinions, and your desperate attempt to argue a connection that isn't there is an obvious deflection for your lack of argument.

I didn't say experience was required to do a good job

You stated in post #1937 that it was "pretty close" to "impossible" to "know what it takes to win" without playing the game. That is very obviously incorrect.

You're being shocked that the Leafs lost is just tied into your consistent wrongness.

I'm very consistently correct actually. I was not "shocked" that the Leafs lost. Disappointed for sure, but no playoff series is guaranteed, much less one against the back-to-back Cup champs.
If anybody is "shocked that the Leafs lost", it would have to be you, since you voted that they would win even more convincingly than I did.

Again, arguing against a point I didn't make.

In post #1950, you attempted to make a comparison between Nylander and your one cherry-picked player, and to do so, you took one season you called irrelevant, wildly exaggerated their difference at ES, and then completely ignored the actual significant difference on the PP that contradicted your stance. When this was pointed out to you, you (in post #1983) seemed to try and justify leaving it out, instead of acknowledging that you were wrong and had left out important information.

You really don't understand the relevance?

Seems you don't either.

 

[Gary Nylund]

I had really hoped that this current Leafs' era was something like the 1960's era but in reality it's shaping up to be like the 1970's teams that only aspired to greatness. That 1970's teams were beloved by its loyal fanbase with Hall of Fame level stars but only won one 7-game playoff series during the entire 1970's (as underdogs to a younger better team, the New York Islanders). Crazy fact: the 1980's Leafs' teams won the same number of 7-game playoff series as the 1970's teams plus won another 5-game series.

I vaguely recall hearing about the consolation of respect earned after consecutive sweeps at the hands of the Montreal Canadiens in 1978 and 1979 as that team's era of contention came to a close.

The current team has way more potential than those 70s teams. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if this team won the cup (or even win multiple cups) whereas those 70s team were never really close to the top teams of that era. To be fair, the top team in the 70s was probably the greatest NHL team of all time but the teams that won before and after them were also way better than the Leafs were.

Cliff notes: There was no "era of contention" for the Leafs in the 70s.

 

[Nineteen67]

It's not always that good management = Stanley Cup success. Of course they're correlated strongly but exceptions are inevitable due only to the fact that good management does not impact the odds and ends of what happens on the ice. Bad breaks and bad bounces happen.

eg. I thought the Doug Wilson Sharks were very very well run for many years, they only made one final, in 2016, and never won the Cup.

The Leafs are outliers in their lack of success but you have to look at Performance and not just Results. Otherwise you're liable to think Marc Bergevin's Habs were better than Dubas' Leafs -- patently untrue.


Do you agree that these criticism, valid as they are, are only a minor part of team building and maintenance? The hardest part is already done.. and for at least the next two years the Leafs have an exceptionally strong and capable core of five exceptionally good players. That's the hardest part and Shanahan and his GMs have done it well.

You can criticize Keefe but he did well this year with the team and I think it's worth keeping him to learn and grow rather than replace him.

The players performed very well this year, didn't they?

They kept the core together for a very long time. This is the number one and number two things a GM should do: assemble and retain a core. They did it with success. All the other players are replaceable.

They have a lot of success as can be seen by their individual and team stats in the regular season. It doesn't help you or anybody to discount that.

The lack of success is 100% on management.

They hired a rookie GM to negotiate the UFA contracts and he ended up putting them in such a bind that it was impossible to ice a Cup contending team.
They were close this year, but they didn’t have enough to compensate for known shortcomings.

Now, they’re going into year 5 and still have a lot of work to do to fill crucial spots. They may hit a home run, who knows, but the strategy seems rely on hope and it all goes back to that first year and a half.

 

[Bluelines]

3 Potential Trade Destinations for Maple Leafs' Petr Mrazek - The Hockey Writers Latest News, Analysis & More

Toronto Maple Leafs goalie Petr Mrazek is a prime trade candidate and will likely be moved. These three teams are worthy of keeping an eye on.

thehockeywriters.com

 

[justashadowof]

The current team has way more potential than those 70s teams. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if this team won the cup (or even win multiple cups) whereas those 70s team were never really close to the top teams of that era. To be fair, the top team in the 70s was probably the greatest NHL team of all time but the teams that won before and after them were also way better than the Leafs were.

Cliff notes: There was no "era of contention" for the Leafs in the 70s.

This team with its better regular season record than those 70's teams still hasn't outperformed them in the NHL playoffs. They won 5 preliminary 3 game series in a row over those years, a couple as underdogs.

 

[Gary Nylund]

This team with its better regular season record than those 70's teams still hasn't outperformed them in the NHL playoffs. They won 5 preliminary 3 game series in a row over those years, a couple as underdogs.

That's true but that doesn't change the fact that the 70s team had zero chance of winning the cup.