McDavid and Matthews feels very similar to the 2005-06 season where Crosby and Ovechkin emerged and just took over the league.
No they won't. He scored 4 goals so far tonight, an impressive feat in itself, yet the Leafs still lost in OT. Aside Matthews and Nylander, there's not another single player in that roster that will be able to bring Toronto anywhere this season.
They're probably going to finish in the bottom 10 this year and they're a long shot for the playoffs but I think you're severely underrating the Leafs short term potential and especially their long term outlook. The Leafs last year weren't that bad territorially. They drove the play pretty well and were in the top half of possession teams in the NHL. They struggled because of a complete and utter lack of scoring talent along with Bernier self-destructing. I don't think Andersen is that great but as long as he doesn't completely implode like Bernier did it's an upgrade. As for the talent up front, they've replaced a bunch of middling players with Matthews, Marner, and Nylander who are all probably going to step in and contribute immediately.
Toronto has very little to offer up for trade, you've got a bunch of under-achievers like Jeoffrey Lupul and Nazem Kadri that never lived up to their expectations, and are hardly an example to a wide-eyed 18 year old just starting.
I don't really get the negativity about Kadri and Lupul, Kadri is a perfectly fine top 6 center, it doesn't matter if he didn't live up to his potential if they've got Matthews playing ahead of him. Lupul is a non-factor, he probably won't play a game for the Leafs and if he does he'll be in a depth role. The defense needs work but I think they'll have better defense simply through addition by subtraction. Phaneuf and Polak played a lot of big minutes for the Leafs last year, and with Phaneuf gone and Polak's role reduced they should be better just from that change along with another year for their young defensemen and adding Zaitsev. Matthews isn't some fresh rookie either, most players his calibre spent their 18 year old seasons obliterating teenagers in the CHL or running over freshmen and sophomores in the NCAA. Matthews was dominant in the top tier pro league in Switzerland playing against grown men, including many seasoned veterans and recent NHLers.
It'll take a few years for Brandon Shanahan and his team to perhaps lure free-agents during the summer, by offering massive contracts to interesting players, or perhaps go for a blockbuster trade that will pretty much empty what's left of the team, and then it's all the same.
If this was any prior version of Leafs management I would be totally expecting them to destroy the group of talent they've assembled but since the current regime with Shanahan and Dubas took the reins they've been smart and made lots of good decisions. I don't see this management group throwing 7 years and over 30 million dollars at David Clarkson, or fetishizing useless plugs like Colton Orr or Frazer McLaren. They also went from being coached by Randy Carlyle, a
guy who can't use a toaster and believes
helmets cause concussions to Mike Babcock. Just going from Carlyle to Babcock alone is enough to pull a team from the abyss, the Leafs lost a lot of games last year but they weren't getting run over like the Oilers. Their goalie imploded and they had nobody who could score. This season they've got a half-decent goalie and added three talented forwards.
I'm a Habs fan and I want desperately for the Leafs to continue being bad but I think we've only got one more year of them being a bad team and they're no longer a pushover. They're not the Oilers, they have good pieces like Rielly on D and some decent depth behind them. They have actual credible NHL forwards like Van Riemsdyk, Michalek, Kadri, and Komarov instead of the gaggle of useless plugs the Oilers surrounded their young talent with. I see this year's Leafs as more akin to the 2005-06 Penguins or the 2007-08 Blackhawks than the last decade of the Oilers, a perennially bad team that's finally crossing the threshold and trending upward.
