Transcript of Will We Ever Get Consistency Out Of These Maple Leafs? | SDP

Both games matter because they are both sides of the same coin, and the coin is the Toronto Maple leaves. You have everything that the Toronto Maple leaves can do and everything they cannot. What it really is, what the cannot is, is consistency. This team for years has done things like we've seen in the last 48 hours. The issue has always been, well, it's 82 games. That's so many games. It's time to figure that out. And season after season after season, well, if you take the game on aggregate, oh, I'm not going to worry too much or whatever. And I get it. It's game seven. But we do have a game seven, literally. We do have-Oh, that's why they lost. Some history here. There you go, right? You do have some history here of a team that does this. And it smells a little bit to me like, I think it was game 10 last year versus Boston, where Where Marshan clowned the team and Bertuzzi's laughing on the bench and whatever. There was a distinct turn after that.

The difference, I think, is Boston was a team that always clowns leaves, and it cemented them in their place of good, not great. You know what I mean? You take on a team like that. It's a measuring stick game. You lose once again. Good, not great. You're better than this team, this team, this team. Not this one. You're not in that class.

This didn't feel like a measuring stick game, though.

No, this wasn't a measuring stick game. This wasn't, of course. Of course. And it was just too perfect because Adam, half an hour, 45 minutes after the Tampa win, who did you get a call from?

I got a call from you.

What was I saying? You were jacked.

You were excited. You said, I don't know what to say. You were also saying you were exhausted because that's the need of it.

I was exhausted, and I tried to hype myself up. I was doing jumping jacks and listening to diss tracks and just trying to get myself fired up. And I had to talk to my friend Adam Wild. And he's like, You know what? Channel this. Burn the house down. Go nuts. And so I did. And I talked about cherishing every win as it comes to you. And they won tonight. And who knows what's going to happen tomorrow night. But all we have is tonight. Hooray. You won. You beat the Tampa Bay Lightning. Fuck those guys. And tomorrow, who gives a damn? You got the two points tonight. And then what did they do? They leaped it up. They leaped it up. Same old team.

There they are. Welcome back, boys.

Great to see you again.

So we start with, guys, the least put Dennis Hildeby in net. And Dennis Hildeby was really good in his other game with the Toronto Maple Leaps this season. This was not his best game.

He was bad. He was bad. Team Him in front of him was bad. He was bad.

But I put Hill to be first because I think it's important to say goalie wasn't great, but that was the least of the problems.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not like...

He didn't exactly Give them a chance to win. I will say that. But, man, this team, what do we have now? We have four wins, three losses to look at. Man, this team can't score when they're bad. Not yet. We haven't seen it yet. I guess it's good. They haven't had a barn burner game.

Honestly, I think this is the first bad loss of the season.

It is. It is. And I suppose that's good. It took them seven games. Lots of teams in this league have gotten their ass kicked. Lots of good teams already this season. Did Florida end up winning last night? They were getting tuned by Minnesota.

I can have a look right now. It's impossible with no other teams. No, they lost. They lost.

There you go. So it's The Leaps are not unique in this regard. They're unique in that we could see this coming from space.

Fun fact about Minnesota, they have not trailed yet this season. Are you kidding? They have lost two games in overtime, but they have not trailed in regulation or over at any point this entire season so far.

That's actually ridiculous.

Yeah. I think it's the six games is a record for consecutive games. Like a franchise record? I got a league record. I got to check if it's franchise or League, but I thought that. That's spectacular. That's amazing. It's incredible. They've been the hottest team, and they're going very underrated.

Other than Calgary.

Other than Winnipeg, I should say. Winnipeg is probably one on hotness. Minnesota is probably two.

This is one of the weirdest starts to a season we've seen league-wide in a while. There's good teams playing like garbage. There's garbage teams who are just way overachieving. You do got to give Columbus props. Tarasoff, Hey, I got a name right, was very good. I didn't have the leaves getting completely sunned by Justin Danforth on my Bingo card. That was depressing. They did well. And it's not just that expectations were low heading into the season. Obviously, they suffered a terrible tragedy, but they also have a ton of injuries on their team. So they're way thinner than they even should be. They shouldn't be in the playoff conversation fully healthy. So to completely get your ass kicked by this team, it's back to back. Yuck. I don't give a shit. You're the leafs. You always play lots of... You always play 12 of them a year. So that's just 24 points in the garbage then?

I didn't see a lot of excuse making about this on on the relevant media channels, social media channels. I don't see a lot of people saying that. I really don't. No. I think a lot of people said, wow, that really sucked. And I think- You saw people going, Well, it's the second half of back to back. No, I didn't see that.

No, no. They're trying to find an excuse. They're not giving it to them. They're like, well, maybe they...

Oh, no. It was-They look terrible. So Mitch Marner said, they said, what are you going to do with a game like this? And he said, flush it down the toilet. And I think if you're a pro athlete, you need to do that. You need to be short memory. When was that? Opening face-off? You need to move on. Listen, he, Matthews, Nye, Tatev, and Reilly were all dash three last night. Crazy. Matthews hadn't been on the ice for a five-on-five goal until that game.

And then he was on for three.

Yeah, it's rough. And I think there is... I don't know if it's a mentality thing, but I think we can all finally admit now that this is a team that has taken shifts off, taken periods off, taken nights off. Last night, it was a night off. I want to say that I thought that if anybody looked okay last night, and the numbers back it up was John Tavares. He apparently was the most effective by the numbers, and that's good. The guy lost eight pounds last week because of this sickness. So if you're wondering why John Tavares is bad, we did a whole segment on it. Chris Johnson said that. I was like, Oh, okay. So this That guy's sick. This guy was really sick.Literally.

Eight pounds.Okay. 8 pounds.

Yeah, that's rough, dude. It's rough.

He doesn't exactly have eight pounds to lose.

No, exactly. So I'm thinking I give him a bit of a pass. I get being upset, and I know he was upset watching this game, but I also look at this as, We will be more upset about this game if the trend continues against St. Louis.

Well, this is the funny thing, right? I look at it as they wanted it so much more than Tampa. They outworked Tampa. They kicked Tampa's ass. It was awesome. Then it's like they never boarded the plane. You can't do that the next two games because you have Berube's first game against the team that fired him and the team that eliminated you.

Jesse, you're at the game Monday night. Vibes after the game in the press conference.I bet they were good.Immaculate. Immaculate.

We know the vibes are good because we were scrumming with, I think it was Nye's who was out there at the time. And like, Mitch comes by. He's not going to talk to anybody. He's talking about... He's swinging by. He's like, singing a tune. I forget what song he was singing.

He doesn't talk, right?

He talked after last night, which was good to see him, JT, and Austin. You get the Well, if you're wearing an A, you have to talk. Yeah, you get that. But the vibes were immaculate. They're all dancing. They're all having a good time after that game. And they were rushing out of the building because they had to be out of there by 10:30 to go make their plane and all that stuff. So it was a big, Hey, everybody, get on the road and go do the next thing. So it was great from the locker room perspective. I don't remember a start to the season for Toronto where six games in, you say all six games, they played well. I agree. They're in every game. They're competitive. At that end of that six games, you saw it on the pregame, too, last night, where before the game, they're sitting there, the TSN panel, and they're like, We've never had such a positive pregame before because we're at this point, this is the seventh game, and there's nothing really to complain about. What do you point to that says, Oh, Toronto's got to fix this. There's no discussion there, and everything was great.

Then they completely reversed it by the end of that first period.

Well, I think sometimes these games, and I think, obviously, we're all lead fans, so you're going to get pissed off watching a game like that. I like that. I think that anybody who's online today going, Well, you shouldn't be mad. Well, listen, man, I'm a fan, and I'm going to be happy when they win. It's that when they lose, dude.Wrong place.Yeah..

Yeah.wrong place, wrong number. Are you lost?Yeah.So show up at a Tim Hortons. You shouldn't be drinking coffee. Yeah. I don't think so. This is where fans hang out. Go be a narc somewhere else.

So that's true.

I don't think anybody should be surprised that this happened. I'm just surprised that it happened so early. With the new coach and how everything was going, I didn't expect... Because they're not going to be good every single night. No. I didn't expect on October, what was it? October 22nd that this would happen. That game seven, we get the, Oh, my God, they're not even trying type of performance. I thought we'd get this a month or a couple of months in. It'd be late November or something because that's going to happen. I'm shocked that we're at this point and we have this performance. But the important thing here is how they rebound on Thursday. Adam, you mentioned it. I think they have the right mentality that, Okay, now it doesn't matter anymore. You have to have that mentality as a professional athlete. When things go wrong, you have to forget about it and move on. Now we got to see, is it truly different from Sheldon Keefe to Craig Burouhé? Is he going to get them back on the horse for a consistent long period of time now? We shouldn't back to be having this type of game, this type of conversation for a long stretch here of the season.

We got to go dozens of games here before we see something like this again.

I know it's October Hockey, but in 24 hours, we got this team's October ceiling and their floor. Yeah. And that floor has got to come up.

So now we need a long run, a stretch of hockey where it's like, you're in this game, you're trying. You're not letting Columbus just go through the neutral zone, get to the net whenever they want the entire game. You're trying every single game. You can lose. Rangers loss.

Yeah.

Hey, great loss.

Montreal. I didn't even hate that.

Montreal, even better loss.

You're nitpicking, right? Like with the Rangers, I'm like, okay, you lost. Well, I think it was 4-1.

Yeah, it was really 2-1. It was a two-one.

It was a two-one game. And you're like, Okay, you only scored one on Igor. He was really good. If you could have had a better game, here's how you would have done it. Go to the net. Next game, you actually do that. But yeah, if any game you lose, you're going to have things where you could have done better. This was just unwatchable.

Exactly.