Toronto Maple Leafs Get an F for Complete Failure at Trade Deadline

There is one team in the NHL that unquestionably lost the NHL Trade Deadline, and it wasn’t close

The Toronto Maple Leafs did absolutely nothing to improve their team during the 2023-24 NHL season.

3PM came and went today and the Toronto Maple Leafs stood pat with their extremely talanted, but extremely flawed roster.

All of their major competitors got better – some just marginally, some significantly.

The Leafs got worse with a pair of bone-headed moves for defensive defenseman that will now probably see them ice the worst, slowest and least mobile blue-line in the NHL. Oh they also added a good replacement for Ryan Reaves, but you know they will sabotage their only good move by sitting Pontus Holmberg instead.

They will play waiver-worthy Ilya Lyubushkin on the top pairing with Morgan Rielly (seemingly learning nothing from their inability to score last year using Luke Scheen in the same role) and they will put Timothy Liljegren in the press box in favor of the ridiculously bad Joel Edmundson.

What they won’t do is improve their team. Excuses about assets won’t fly. This is a disgrace.

Trade Deadline Was a Disgrace and Embarrassment for the Toronto Maple Leafs

The Toronto Maple Leafs Haven’t won a Stanley Cup in over 50 years. They have never even been to the Finals since the NHL expanded beyond six teams.

And despite having the two best players in the history of a 100 year old franchise, they elected to do nothing.

They will enter the playoffs with horrible goaltending. They will have Max Domi playing too high in the lineup, and they will have a blue-line incapable of facilitating offense. They won’t be good at killing penalties.

They have many flaws and adressed none of them.

Despite the fact that Auston Matthews is at the absolute peak of his career, the Toronto Maple Leafs didn’t feel it was worth trying to win. They still might because their core can be unstoppable if they get hot at the same time as their goalie.

But the odds of that happening without a star goalie or a star defenseman on the roster are low.

Last year’s team was faster, deeper, had more stars and played better defense.

This year’s version, thanks to Brad Treliving flushing 15 of the 20 million he had to spend down the toilet and then doing absolutely nothing to improve in-season, is significantly worse than the one that lost last year.

The best Leafs fans can hope for is a flukey run. The most likely thing to happen is that they get destroyed by the Bruins in the opening playoff round.

I won’t be cheering for that outcome, but at least it might remove the toxic hand of Brendan Shanahan from this organization, which, by the way, is now a complete joke.

A team that has existed for five years just made the vaunted Toronto Maple Leafs look like a bunch of losers. They owed their fans so much better than this.

I can forgive taking risks that don’t work out. I can’t accept just doing nothing and hoping for the best.