Joe’s Notes: The Toronto Maple Leafs Are Rich and Bad

From the most recent line of Forbes’s “Most Valuable Franchises,” with championships in the last 50 seasons in parentheses:

• NFL: Dallas (4), New England (6), LA Rams (2), NY Giants (4), Chicago (1)
• MLB: NY Yankees (7), Los Angeles (3), Boston (4), Chicago Cubs (1), San Francisco (3)
• NBA: Golden State (5), New York (0), LA Lakers (11), Boston (6), LA Clippers (0)
• NHL: Toronto (0), NY Rangers (1), Montreal (6), Los Angeles (2), Boston (1)

You can see the tagline now. “The Maple Leafs – Worse than the Knicks.”

The Leafs, of course, used to be a lot better. They have 13 Stanley Cups to their name. Six of those were won in the same ten-year stretch. Three others were won consecutively in the 60s. Now, though, the Leafs have an even longer title drought than the Knicks, and they occupy a stronger position in their sport than the Knicks do in theirs. The Leafs have every advantage this universe could offer an NHL team, and yet on Saturday, the story of their postseason became Auston Matthews and William Nylander chewing our Mitch Marner on the bench in the middle of what will more likely than not be their penultimate game of the year.

The drought isn’t bad postseason luck, either. Since winning their last Stanley Cup, something that happened in 1964, the Leafs have only won their division twice. In 2000, they won the Northeast Division despite finishing fourth in the Eastern Conference. In the 2021 campaign, they won the North Division, the one the NHL built out of all the Canadian teams to avoid the headache of Covid-era cross-border travel. The Leafs aren’t just a team who struggles in the postseason. They’re a franchise who cannot manage to be great.

Things have been better lately. Postseason appearances have been the norm. But it’s not like the Leafs have been getting stunned in these first rounds. That was only really the case in that 2021 year. In all the rest, they’ve lost when they’ve been expected to lose. Only once have they lost as a seed-line favorite. The Leafs are just bad.

Why is this? I don’t think it’s entirely the Leafs’ fault. It’s the Leafs’ fault they’re bad, of course. That piece is their fault. But it’s not the Leafs’ fault that they’re rich and bad.

The five most valuable NFL franchises have won 17 of the last 50 Super Bowls. The five most valuable MLB franchises have won 18 of the last 50 World Series. The five most valuable NBA franchises have won 22 of the last 50 NBA Finals. The five most valuable NHL franchises have won 10 of the last 50 Stanley Cups.

What does this show us?

The relationship between finances and wins has been weaker in the NHL than in the rest of the Big Four over the modern era. In the other three sports, money leads to wins and wins lead to money more often than they do in hockey.

For the first of these—money leading to wins—let’s look back at a graph we posted last January looking at the payrolls across these Big Four leagues:

What do we notice? Hockey is a tightly-bunched sport when it comes to how much teams spend. The salary cap is tight in hockey. Most teams butt right up against it. This probably tightens competition. Every owner in the league can spend to the cap. The Leafs can offer the advantage of playing in one of the three biggest cities in the league, and the most hockey-crazed of those three, but they can’t outbid their competition the way the Yankees can.

For the second part—wins leading to money—let’s look at a table from that same blog post.

The NHL may have a tightly followed cap, but it isn’t the most tightly followed. The NFL, in a jarring indictment of the NFLPA’s performance, has the most uniform group of payrolls in sports. Accounting for size, NFL payrolls deviate less from one another than even the NHL’s. The NFL still has plenty of dynasties, though. And what do we see from those dynasties, going back to the top? Two of them—the Cowboys and Patriots, placed in big markets but not the biggest—are the two most valuable in the entire sport of football. In the NFL, money doesn’t beget winning. But winning does beget money. (This also happened with the Warriors. Big market, not the biggest, whole lot of winning.)

Why doesn’t this happen in hockey? Nobody’s won often enough to make it happen. At least not in the big cities. Had the Canadiens’ most recent dynastic run happened in the 90s rather than the 70s, this might be different. Had the Blackhawks not been among the worst teams in the league in the eras both approaching and following their run, this might be different. Had the Rangers or Bruins or Flyers gotten great and stayed that way, this might be different. Instead, the Leafs are the most valuable NHL franchise. Kind of by default.

So, it’s the Leafs’ fault for being so unsuccessful throughout all of our lifetimes. But it’s not really their fault for being the richest franchise anyway.

Is Kevin Durant Done With the Suns?

Put another way: Are the Suns done with Kevin Durant?

Kevin Durant is not famous for his loyalty to NBA franchises or his tolerance of losing situations, no matter his role in creating them. The Suns are in salary cap hell largely because of their commitments to two aging stars. One of those—Bradley Beal—is not at all old, but he is aging, and he’s currently a negative-value asset, the kind of player only available in some degree of salary dump. He also has a no-trade clause. The surest thing about the Suns is the worst thing for their roster construction. Bradley Beal will be there.

The other aging star is Durant, who even at 35 remains among the best players in the game.

Will Durant ask out? Should the Suns wait for him to ask?

The problem for Phoenix is that if they do trade Durant, it’ll probably signal the start of some sort of rebuild, one they’d be beginning with few draft picks to speak of and a best player in Devin Booker who might not want to sit through the process. Durant would be a prized asset, one who could get the Suns maybe half the picks they gave up to get him. But if winning now is the goal, Durant remains the player you want. Maybe the Suns can pull something off like trading Durant for both Donovan Mitchell and Evan Mobley (I don’t know if this would even make sense, for the Suns or the Cavs), broadening their depth and mixing up their star pantry and hoping they find a recipe that works. If they can’t, their choices become to either run it back or to start the dreaded rebuild, whole hog. Which means the relevant question might not only be whether the Suns and Kevin Durant are done with one another, but if Devin Booker could conceivably head out of town himself.

The Rest

MLB:

• Don’t look now, but the Braves have the best record in baseball, Ozzie Albies made a startlingly fast recovery from his broken toe, and 35-year-old Chris Sale is pitching at his 2019 level, which is to say he’s pitching like a competent second or third starter. Those early Max Fried struggles are gone—he threw a complete-game shutout his last time out—and the Atlanta farm system has started to regenerate, meaning trade deadline activity could be back on the table. There is no reason the Braves shouldn’t be the World Series favorites right now.

College basketball:

• The big news today in the transfer portal (at least so far) is that Aidan Mahaney is heading from Saint Mary’s to UConn. This comes on the heels of consensus five-star Liam McNeeley committing to the Huskies on Friday night. The obvious comps here are Cam Spencer and Stephon Castle, and while Castle and McNeeley aren’t all that similar in their styles, the bigger concern with the comparison is how much it asks of Mahaney and McNeeley. Spencer and Castle were two of the most noteworthy overperformers in the country last year relative to what was expected of them by the reasonable among us. Maybe Dan Hurley runs that good of a program, one that can turn McNeeley into a one-and-done lottery pick and Mahaney into a 44% high-volume shooter from deep. More likely, this is going to be a little like Johnny Furphy at Kansas backfilling behind Gradey Dick. It might go pretty well, but it’ll likely take some time to mesh, and at best, it’ll only be an echo of what came before. UConn can be the best team in the country again, but McNeeley and Mahaney both being top-20 players would be a bigger surprise.
• There’s also the question of continuity, something we wrote about a week ago. A lot of UConn’s production is going to be internal promotions, as it was this year and as it was with Nick Saban’s Alabama football dynasty once upon a time. But the Huskies’ cupboard is just bare enough that if I’m reading the roster correctly, they’re probably going to add another transfer or two, likely in a significant role. That’s in addition to Mahaney and Tarris Reed. It’s not a crazy amount of turnover, but it’s significant.

The NBA:

• Did every series get more interesting over the weekend besides Celtics/Heat? The Magic are back in it against the Cavs. The Thunder might be a real title contender. The spotlight is shining longer on the Lakers’ organizational dysfunction thanks to the existence of a Game 5. After looking dead earlier this year and then very alive again, the Sixers are back on the brink. The Clippers are unexpectedly alive. The Bucks are imploding. The Timberwolves allowed us to talk a whole lot about the Suns.
• You would think that tonight’s the night the Nuggets put the Lakers away, and that the Thunder finish off the Pelicans as well. I’m not going to count out the Heat from Game 4, although it would fit one sort of series archetype, that in which the better team suffers one terrible upset and then figures it out. On that archetype topic: I’m curious if these NBA series follow more predictable patterns than their NHL and MLB counterparts. If that’s true, it might imply that teams expect sometimes to win and lose certain games. But again, almost all these series got more interesting over the weekend, and that’s mostly because of unexpected things happening. The theory might be sunk.

The NHL:

• The Canucks might not feel great about their goalie situation for the long run, down to third-stringer Arturs Silovs, but they only need one more win to get past the Predators, and the lesson Connor Hellebuyck reminded us about in Denver is that goalies are streaky beasts. Some real nightmare outcomes for Western Conference teams yesterday. It looked like the Kings were going to get on the board early last night, but Stuart Skinner did a pretty great wall impression.
• It still looks like a matter of time in Panthers/Lightning, but Knights/Stars is good again. The Stars had to get one in Vegas to keep the series alive. They already got it, and now they have the chance to reset the whole thing.

Chicago:

• It was a tough weekend for the Cubs. Friday night went great, but then there was the blowout on Saturday, and last night’s comeback–that–wasn’t closed the door on the team’s first series loss since San Diego. That in itself isn’t that bad, but a Jordan Wicks forearm strain is. Wicks was scratched from yesterday’s start with an injury to a part of the body commonly associated with Tommy John surgery. A top-50 prospect in some places, a lot of the cases for optimism with this Cubs roster revolved around the lefty, whose mean expectation for the year had him landing as the fourth starter on the staff.
• Who will fill in for Wicks? At the moment, the expectation seems to be Hayden Wesneski again on Friday, but that could change. By next week, it could be Justin Steele slotting in. As of Saturday, it was sounding like he could make a rehab start on Wednesday for Iowa and come up afterwards, having thrown 47 pitches on Friday in extended spring training. But a lot can happen in the seven games before even the earliest Steele start, and on Wednesday, Shōta Imanaga is being asked to throw on normal MLB rest for what might be the first time in his career. Rest is normally longer in Japan, and Imanaga has been able to pitch on at least five days of rest in each of his starts so far. Tough series with the Mets ahead, though starting it with Jameson Taillon and Javier Assad is a solid setup, at least by the standards of this staff.
• Luke Little was sent down at the same time Wicks went on the IL, with Richard Lovelady and Daniel Palencia brought up to take those two spots. Lovelady is 28 and profiles as a fairly average lefty out of the bullpen. Palencia had some memorable moments last year in both directions. He was a badass in his Fourth of July debut.
• There isn’t much going on in the Blackhawks’ world, but the IceHogs are down 1–0 to the Grand Rapids Griffins in the Calder Cup’s round of sixteen. It’s a five-game series, and it’s using a 1–2–1–1 schedule, possibly because of arena availability? I don’t think that series schedule is the norm. Game 1 was in Rockford on Saturday. Game 2’s in Michigan on Wednesday night.
• The Bears only ended up with five draft picks in total, all in the first five rounds. They spent one on a punter (Tory Taylor, the Iowa guy) and one on Kiran Amegadjie, a Yale-produced tackle from the suburbs. The last was Austin Booker, an edge rusher out of Kansas State. Amegadjie provides some important depth on the offensive line, but I’m curious how people smarter than me feel about the Bears’ defense. Not that they had great opportunities to upgrade it through the draft, but it seems like they’re really focused on the offense, and while that’s probably the right move when trying to give your historically hyped rookie quarterback a soft landing, it could lead to some frustrations in the short term. Montez Sweat can only play one position.

The Packers, Iowa State:

• The Packers had a lot of draft picks, and after Jordan Morgan, they took a “diversify the portfolio” approach. MarShawn Lloyd, the third-round running back pick out of USC, fits the most neatly into an expectation, that expectation being that he’ll replace AJ Dillon as the second back next year. Edgerrin Cooper and Ty’Ron Hopper will be in the defensive mix, as will Javon Bullard back in the secondary, but I think there’s a reason the Packers drafted three safeties and a cornerback, and I think that reason is that they want a lot of lottery tickets on the defensive side of the ball.
• Going back to the offense, the Packers did add multiple offensive linemen even after picking up Jordan Morgan on Thursday night. They’ve since reportedly added two more through undrafted free agency. They’re looking for some depth in that unit. And to close out the depth conversation, Michael Pratt is into the QB room as a seventh-round pick.
• On the Cyclone side, T.J. Tampa was one of the weekend’s biggest fallers, going late in the fourth round to the Baltimore Ravens. I still haven’t seen an explanation for his drop, but it was an odd development. Not a bad spot to land as a defensive player, though.