2024-25 NHL team preview: Toronto Maple Leafs
LAST SEASON
It’s never anything less than dramatic in Toronto, and the Maple Leafs rode a wave of significant change into last season. They’d ended a 19-year playoff series win drought the previous spring by defeating the Tampa Bay Lightning but were brushed aside so easily by the Florida Panthers in Round 2 that it erased a lot of the goodwill. Kyle Dubas vacated his GM role in a messy divorce. Brad Treliving replaced him and immediately went to work reshaping the team’s identity, adding “snot” in the form of Ryan Reaves, Tyler Bertuzzi, Max Domi, Simon Benoit and more. After the Leafs had been bullied out of the playoffs by the league’s toughest team, the idea was to craft a roster built to win in May and June, not the regular season.
The Leafs were indeed tougher – much tougher. They finished near the top of the league in hits and penalty minutes per game. They didn’t give away any offense, as superstar Auston Matthews delivered a franchise-record 69 goals and William Nylander exploded for 98 points in his contract year. But they did give away quite a bit of defensive mobility. They went from a stingy team in the last few years of Dubas to a middling one in their own end, and the result was a nine-point drop in the standings from 111 to 102, good for third in the Atlantic Division.
Of course, the fan base didn’t care. What mattered was the playoffs. Would the new-look Leafs deliver? They certainly didn’t look intimidated by the Big, Bad Boston Bruins, pushing them to overtime of Game 7. But the same old Leafs resurfaced, panicking on a dump-in and letting David Pastrnak waltz in for the series winner after Ilya Samsonov and Morgan Rielly’s “I got it, no you got it” sequence. Make that seven first-round exits in eight years of the Matthews/Mitch Marner era.
