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2025-26 Toronto Maple Leafs General Discussion

Bill_Berg said:
So the MCL is far better than the ACL meaning he'll be fully recovered by season start next year?
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Might be surgery involved in repairing a grade 3 tear (full tear). The two week wait is to see if the ACL is borked too, I’m guessing. If he’s got other issues previously holding him back, might as well get that stuff sorted too. Makes for a brutal recovery period but it’s overlapped instead of stacked sequentially. It will affect his offseason preparation to some degree.
 
Bender said:
I'm so tired of the covid cap and "they were paid what they were worth" excuses. The whole league had to deal with the same cap and other players came due for contracts. Instead of pivoting when they knew the cap wasn't going up they doubled down on regular season success and playoff futility.

As for contracts, they played hardball with Willy and got him at a very good number (barring his first year) and refused to do that with Mitch and Auston and instead coddled them both, especially with Mitch's camp being highly unprofessional along the way. Point, Kucherov, Rantanen, Aho. The list goes on - the Leafs players had the most expensive contracts vs. their comparables, and the easy way to know that at minimum Mitch was overpaid was looking that he got barely over $1M raise from a contract he signed 6yrs prior.

If the management group had any stones like Vegas they'd have no problem trading one or both of them if they put themselves before the team.
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But there’s no guarantee (as we’ve seen right now) that pivoting off one of the star forwards means a better team. It would mean a different team, but not necessarily better. And while they were overpaid relative to their peers, they consistently produced and I’d argue that the Leafs, at least during the Dubas years, consistently found productive value throughout the rest of the lineup. Plenty of teams had their stars for less cap hit, sure, but plenty of them overpaid other players throughout the lineup too. What’s the difference if your overpays happen to the stars or the rest of the lineup? Especially when the cap was flat, there was no guarantee that trading one of those guys makes the team better.
 
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