At their best, the Toronto Maple Leafs are an assembly of some of the world’s best hockey players, which renders their six consecutive failures in the first round a darkly hilarious joke to the neutral observer. Toronto continually established itself among the best regular-season teams, only for that distinction to be rendered effectively meaningless when the games mattered.
Through this line of thinking, there’s a fallacy to assume all of these Maple Leafs teams were built equally. In a season where a first-round exit may cause some heads to roll, the Maple Leafs acquired Ryan O’Reilly, Noel Acciari and Jake McCabe at the deadline, then signed 20-year-old top prospect Matthew Knies to an entry-level contract just before the regular season ended.