When the Toronto Maple Leafs regressed last season, failing to advance beyond the play-in round on their own sheet of ice in the NHL's Eastern Conference bubble, the team appeared well without answers to the series of questions which would dictate whether it would one day achieve the meaningful success that has eluded the team, as well as several iterations of it previous.
Building blocks — tremendous ones — were still firmly in place, but the efforts made to support that core group proved fundamentally flawed. Expected to be firmly established by this point, instead the Maple Leafs had crashed, again, into the unforgiving opening-round ceiling.