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I’ve pretty much resigned myself that I will not see them win another Stanley Cup in my life. I saw them win when I was 9 years old. For all of the years watching them, maybe they need to punt the know it alls, and get someone, like myself, that’s lived through the minefield that’s being a Leafs fan for 60 years. I could do a better job, using their resources to build a team that could win. I’ve known for decades that they haven’t had a leader, that can drag them into the fight and be the spiritual leader to get them to the next level. You can look at the last 10 years. Before that, the Phaneuf/Kessel years. No blood and guts. The last incarnation of this was the Pat Burns era. Tucker, Domi, Corson, Roberts…..all players that would put their team on their backs and will them to win. We’ve seen none of that for 25 years. Sometimes, You need to move elite talent to get those assets and build around them. Not the other way around. Analytics may be a useful tool, but it doesn’t read the intangibles that are required to win. The Leafs had 3 elite talented scorers and what did they get out of it? Playoff dystopia. You win with a combination of talent and brawn. You need fighters, checkers and straight out leaders. Leafs have not had that in 25 years. I’m tired of the rich man’s game. Tear this garbage team down and start at the top and work downwards.
you get my vote.
i wasn’t born yet when the last time the leafs won. i just missed it by three years. i doubt i’ll live long enough to see them win it again. i hope i am wrong.
i don’t know who the next leafs gm should be, but i don’t think it’s sundin. it’s a nostalgia pick and a weird one.
at least drai and mcdavid got past the ducks. i wanna see somebody drop gudas.
i’ll probably watch hagel tonight. that kid is fun to watch. if you drink enough and squint while looking at him, he becomes darcy tucker.
the oilers problem is so basic that even i can figure it out. it might not be 100% on the goalies, but it’s been a glaring issue for many years running now.
leafs issue is a little more infuriating and complex. ownership, low standards, corporate mindset, soft players, systems, defense, etc.
i know a guy like hagel is technically too old to bring in on a rebuild, but you also need a mentor who plays the game the right way by example and shows the young rookies how to act. i wish we had him. i’d have the video crew put together a 2-hour long movie of hagel clips and make the youngsters watch it until they memorize it. i swear he’s darcy tucker reborn with better hands. talent, snot, piss, vinegar, and finishing ability. fuck tampax. how the fuck do they keep landing these guys?
speaking of which, did anyone else see that hit on slafkovsky last night? i swear if you watch it in slow motion, you can see his soul leave the body.
i swear i am going to quit watching oiler games. it’s a fucking war crime to watch mcdavid get pissed away like this. him and drai should GTFO of town.
oilers losing out to the fucking ducks is gonna blow my bracket to kingdom come.
ottawa is gone and probably the oilers are next unless mcdavid and drai can drag them through a round or two before the lack of goaltending and shoddy defense catches up to them.
it makes me want to vomit saying it, but habs probably have the best shot of any canadian team. if their goaltending holds up. i’m still sort of rooting for freddie in carolina and mitch in vegas. freddie is great until the inevitable injury comes and then carolina is cooked. i think colorado stops any hope of vegas coming out of the west though.seems weird to me that none of the teams with elite goalies are doing well (or even qualified). almost every vezina candidate is either playing golf or struggling like vasilevsky.
what would a realistic return on matthews look like? lets be brutally honest with ourselves. fans often overvalue their players in hypothetical trades.
going our way is the fact that the cap is rising. if matthews wanted out and waived his no trade, it’s not like he’s on a bargain contract. he would need a new deal or extension soon after and he would be looking to cash in one last time before he’s way past his prime earning years. ruling out something crazy like a one for one elites deal, we would be looking at a first round pick, a roster player or blue chip prospect, and possibly some throw ins like low picks or low-ceiling prospects. i think thats a fairly realistic expectation and i’m not sure we get that much necessarily. the leafs have a history of getting low-balled and settling for less. it sucks to even contemplate getting less than that for him, but here we are.
i’d take a first, a second, a third, and Hagel.
Your price doesn’t help the Leafs rebuild as Hagel is 27, too old to survive a rebuild. Tampa Bay probably wouldn’t want to give him up anyway. A 1st, 2nd and a young roster player is closer to Nylander’s value. Matthews, under the correct scenario, is significantly more valuable.
The first thing to consider is that you can’t trade Matthews at this very moment for two major reasons.
1) The Leafs don’t have their 1st round pick for next year so tanking right now only helps Boston / Philadelphia.
2) They stand to get more for Matthews if they rebuild Matthews’ value first.However, if they give up their pick to Boston in 2026 and the Flyers in 2027, it makes A LOT of sense to trade Matthews at the 2027 draft for maximum value. If the Leafs have to give the Bruins the 2027 pick and the Flyers the 2028 pick, it creates a disaster for the Leafs ability to rebuild for years.
So imagine a scenario where Matthews is healthy next year and scores 45-50 goals again, his value is back up and the Leafs will have their 1st round pick again for 2028.
A realistic return on Matthews would be very, very good. Here are the reasons why.
Any team that acquires Matthews would only have to pay him 450K in real dollars. Yes, that’s right, 450K for one of the best snipers of this generation. With Matthews’ salary being almost entirely upfront signing bonuses, whatever team acquires Matthews will pay him next to nothing in real dollars. Additionally, if the Leafs retain 50% of his cap hit (who cares, they would be rebuilding if they trade him anyway) then his cap hit will be an absurd 6.625 AAV. And then, if all of that wasn’t already good enough, whatever team acquires him has the time to negotiate an 8 year extension which he might finally accept as he exits his prime years. This allows any team that acquires him to “go for it” with Matthews making peanuts in real dollars and a 50% cap hit discount for 1 year as a rental and/or add him long term with time to make the space for him to fit.
Now imagine a scenario where Utah, Anaheim, LA or San Jose want Matthews to contend with the big boys in the West and the other big boys in the West find out about that. Do you think Colorado could move 6.625 AAV to acquire Matthews, even as a 1 year rental? Same goes for Dallas, Minnesota, Vegas and Edmonton. You could have 6-8 teams in the West throwing offers at you left, right and center, all trying to out bid the other contenders in the West. And then, you might have some insane offer from one or two teams in the East if a contender wants to make a huge splash like Carolina.
If you look at what Rantanen got (Stankoven (under 23 roster player), two 1sts and two 3rds), Matthews could easily get that as an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM and probably get way more through a bidding war and contract retention is 50%.
I think two 1st round picks, a bluechip top prospect and a young (under 23) roster player is fair value for Matthews with a 6.625 cap hit and exclusive rights to negotiate an 8 year extension. Basically, four 1st round picks which would be standard value for a high value player signing an offer sheet as an example.
ok, those are some fair points. i didn’t know all that about structuring contracts and now that you mention it, somebody like matthews would attract multiple suitors.
you’ve convinced me, now the leafs would just need to convince another gm in that scenario. it will be interesting to see what happens next season. if i’m matthews, i’m low-key looking at my options and getting my affairs in order for a move to another team or country. getting assassinated by gudas and watching my teammates lollygag around like eunuchs and doing nothing. gudas could have whipped out his junk and pissed on matthews and nobody in a blue jersey would do anything about it. shit, i wanted to see somebody come off the bench and at least try if the pantywaists on the ice wouldn’t. fuck, i’d half expect berube to see red, flash back to his enforcer days, and go after gudas in the tunnel later or something.
if matthews stays and i was him, i get up in front of the whole team in the locker room and lay down the new law. maybe even get adversarial a little, get in some faces, poke some chests, call out some shit into the open and confront it. if he wouldn’t do that, then i’m not sure if i’d want him. and if he did and it didn’t make a difference starting with the next game, my next call would be to my agent and the GM.
what would a realistic return on matthews look like? lets be brutally honest with ourselves. fans often overvalue their players in hypothetical trades.
going our way is the fact that the cap is rising. if matthews wanted out and waived his no trade, it’s not like he’s on a bargain contract. he would need a new deal or extension soon after and he would be looking to cash in one last time before he’s way past his prime earning years. ruling out something crazy like a one for one elites deal, we would be looking at a first round pick, a roster player or blue chip prospect, and possibly some throw ins like low picks or low-ceiling prospects. i think thats a fairly realistic expectation and i’m not sure we get that much necessarily. the leafs have a history of getting low-balled and settling for less. it sucks to even contemplate getting less than that for him, but here we are.
i’d take a first, a second, a third, and Hagel.
leafs can play musical chairs with management and coaching all they want, but the rot starts at the top with mlse and pelley. after this debacle of a season, the questions need to be directed at the top. run it back, run it back, run it back, run it back, throw away money, hand out no trade clauses like candy, buy high sell low, scapegoating then trading marner for gimps and peanuts. thats not on berube or his assistants or the players. thats on ownership for letting this shit happen while they stack profits on a system optimized to make losing profitable. its a goddamm shitshow at the top. at this rate, i wont live long enough to witness the leafs finally win a cup or even make it to the semis. jesus fucking christ, are we supposed to cheer for ottawa or edmonton? i don’t know. just wanted to yell about it.
I tend to agree with you. Management and coaching can’t fix this current problem. But it can rebuild it from scratch with a giant head start. With Matthews and Nylander the Leafs have two individual players that can be winners somewhere else but not as core players in Toronto. Think of Phil Kessel but with twice the value. Step one has to be to trade these two guys at the 2027 draft. The Leafs can’t afford to tank in 2026 because it just pushes the 1st round pick to the next year. They’re better off building the value back up to recover a minimum of 5 major assets. Where it is five first round picks OR five top prospects or five young roster players. Or any combination.
Fuck Ottawa in it’s entirety. The entire shithole of a city can implode for all I care including the corrupt pieces of shit who run the country. The hockey team can go fuck itself along with it.
I’d much rather see Edmonton win it for McDavid.
i would have never dreamed of trading matthews until this season. and not because of him, but because he is wasted here. toronto is wasting matthews the way that edmonton is wasting mcdavid. an elite generational talent just pissed away on mediocre teams. what really killed me and pushed me into trade territory was the gudas hit. gudas should have been gang piled by everyone on the ice, including the goalie. fuck that. you don’t target the teams captain and star player and no retaliation? what the actual fuck? matthews must have felt like shit knowing he was targeted by a notorious goon and his teammates just blew it off like it meant nothing. because it did mean nothing to spineless shits like rielly, willy, and carlo. if i was matthews, my mind would have been made up right then. i’d want out. fuck those guys.
trade matthews and set him free. like phil, he’ll win a cup somewhere else. it pains me to say it. i can’t believe i’m saying it but here we are.
i’m on the fence about willy. trade him if the return is right, but i don’t think he brings much in return for trade value versus what he’s worth to the team. the only pure oneway floating sniper winger we have. i don’t expect him to be a center, take faceoffs, kill penalties, or be defensively responsible. his job is just to score goals, which he’s good at. if the return is subpar, we keep him and let him show the new kids how to dress for instagram clout. if he gets you a first rounder, trade him and let him be soft somewhere else.
the problem with full rebuild is we’ve been here before. we drafted matthews and marner and fucked that up royally. so, we do it again? trade everyone for picks, draft new talent and then fuck that up again in 10 years when the new window is supposed to be open and remains closed because we’ve learned nothing and just shuffled the chairs again. it also kills me to say it, but i don’t give a fuck who wins the cup this year. i guess i’ll take mcdavid also, but i’d like to see marner win it just to rub salt in the wound and make the lesson more painful.
leafs can play musical chairs with management and coaching all they want, but the rot starts at the top with mlse and pelley. after this debacle of a season, the questions need to be directed at the top. run it back, run it back, run it back, run it back, throw away money, hand out no trade clauses like candy, buy high sell low, scapegoating then trading marner for gimps and peanuts. thats not on berube or his assistants or the players. thats on ownership for letting this shit happen while they stack profits on a system optimized to make losing profitable. its a goddamm shitshow at the top. at this rate, i wont live long enough to witness the leafs finally win a cup or even make it to the semis. jesus fucking christ, are we supposed to cheer for ottawa or edmonton? i don’t know. just wanted to yell about it.
all the hockeybuzz leafs blogs are partially or completely written by AI. there is a site called quillbot where you can paste text or images to see if they are AI-generated or altered. the leafs blogs posted recently are AI. the blogger is using the AI to do the research work (on gm candidates for example) and then putting it together in a blog. if I want to read what some AI wrote, I’d just ask the AI myself and skip the lazy-writer middleman. i mean seriously, a hockey blog is a thousand words, give or take. for all we know “jay on the leafs” is just eklund using AI and a spellchecker.
so uggie told me to come here and here i am. is this where everyone from hockeybuzz is now?
i just went back to buzz and looked at the new leafs blog. it’s all human written. dude made a liar out of me. we’ll see how long he can go without resorting to it again.
is this site always this damn slow? it takes forever for pages to change or comments to load.
