The Maple Leafs improved. The Maple Leafs need a major change. Why can’t both be true?

It will be 25 years next month since the Detroit Red Wings broke a 42-year championship drought. On the ice that day at Joe Louis Arena, hoisting the Stanley Cup for the first time in his career, was a power forward named Brendan Shanahan.

He was, arguably, the piece that put a perennially dominant but underachieving franchise over the top. The Red Wings had bombed out as huge favorites in the first round of the 1993 and 1994 playoffs, lost in the 1995 final and fell in the 1996 Western Conference final despite setting an NHL regular-season record with 62 wins. Early in the 1996-97 season, co-GMs Scotty Bowman and Jim Devellano decided enough was enough. They sacrificed their promising holdout center Keith Primeau and future Hall of Fame defenseman Paul Coffey to get Shanahan in a Winged Wheel jersey.

Now, two and a half decades later, Shanahan finds himself at the opposite end of a similar crossroads. His Toronto Maple Leafs continue to scorch their regular-season record book. They set franchise highs for victories in a season with 54 and points with 115 in 2021-22. Their superstar, Auston Matthews, smashed their single-season goals record, finishing with 60 in just 73 games, while becoming the first Leaf since Doug Gilmour to crest 100 points. Yet the end-of-season result was the familiar, rusty blade, plunged back into a scar that never gets to heal over for hockey’s most tortured fan base. Toronto dropped an opening-round playoff series for the sixth consecutive time in the Matthews era; fell to 0-9 over that span in games with an opportunity to clinch a series; and extended its playoff series win drought to 18 years.

So does that mean the Leafs will make like Shanahan’s old team, decide there’s nothing to lose and finally make a tidal wave of changes this offseason?

No. Not according to the tone, and the verbal crumbs offered, in the season-ending presser delivered by Leafs president Shanahan, GM Kyle Dubas and coach Sheldon Keefe Tuesday at the Ford Performance Centre, the team’s practice facility.

Shanahan spoke off the top about “looking forward to working with Kyle and Sheldon next season,” immediately establishing that his GM and coach won’t be punished for Toronto’s seven-game loss to the back-to-back defending champion Tampa Bay Lightning.

But if the team’s primary shepherds on the decision-making side aren’t going anywhere, what about the players? Can we expect a prominent member of the Maple Leafs’ core to change addresses this offseason? Again, the message was mostly “No,” Tuesday, though Shanahan and Dubas arguably left some room for imagination. It’s obvious that Hart Trophy finalist Matthews wouldn’t be moved in any scenario, while captain John Tavares’ $11-million AAV and no-movement clause are non-starters. Right winger Mitch Marner appears to still be a major part of the team’s nucleus after a career-best season. Right winger William Nylander has no active movement restrictions on his deal and has the most appealing cap hit to move, so most questions about chopping up the team’s core likely allude to him. Speaking Tuesday, however, the Leafs brass didn’t appear to view a monster move like that as an automatic solution.

“I think the contracts to those players, they’re providing us great value for it in the way they’re producing and the way they continue to evolve as they go through their contracts,” Dubas said. “I don’t regret those at all. I just think it’s the reality of the league right now that you’re probably not going to be able to spend as much as you want on those depth pieces, and you’re really going to have to do a great job finding value, whether that’s someone that’s coming off injury, someone that hasn’t been given a great opportunity, someone coming off a bad year that you think you see something in that’s a fit specifically for your team and you can bring them in and help. Whether that’s next year’s edition of (Michael) Bunting or (David) Kampf or (Ondrej) Kase, whatever different reason they’re going to be a good fit, that’s really where we have to focus.

“I’ve never felt it’s best to detract some of your very best players to spread the dollars around to players who aren’t as good.”

Dubas, however, wouldn’t commit quite as adamantly as in previous offseasons to protecting his team’s stars from being traded. He wouldn’t 100 percent rule out moving a “core” player this time if the right opportunity fell into his lap (see my story on from Tuesday). But the default stance appears to be that the Leafs don’t want to nuke their roster. Dubas claimed it’s his responsibility to “replicate, in most regards, the way that we operated last summer,” during which most of his bargain-hunter additions, save for the Nick Ritchie signing, worked out extremely well, especially Calder Trophy finalist Bunting. Dubas pointed out that, give or take, 18 teams operated at or above the salary cap this season using LTIR, that it’s the reality of the league in a post-pandemic economic setup. He also expressed confidence in Toronto’s AHL affiliate providing an injection of depth from within next season, not just from the higher-end prospects like Nick Robertson but also from speedy bottom-six depth forwards like Joey Anderson.

So if you’re taking notes on the plans: we’ve got “find more Buntings and Kampfs” and “promote players from the Marlies to help.” So the Leafs weren’t talking like a team planning blockbuster moves. But why? Why does a team with so many recent failures lean toward running it back?

Because Toronto doesn’t view 2021-22’s defeat the same way it did the 2020 bubble loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets or the 2021 soul-crusher in which it blew a 3-1 series lead to the Montreal Canadiens.

“You look at the 89 games that we played, and the first 82 gave us a good chance going into the series, obviously home-ice advantage and knowing we were playing against a challenging opponent,” Keefe said. “I look at how we started the series, came out and asserted ourselves, how we responded each time when we lost a game, so many different things that I felt good about with the team, which I felt was great progress, the type of progress you need to have as a team. We have to find a way to ultimately just close it out.”

“In spite of the fact of not being able to finish Tampa off in Game 6 and Game 7, I saw a different team and different approach,” Shanahan said. “I thought in the past couple seasons when we had an opportunity to eliminate a team, we got back on our heels. One of the things that I liked about this year’s process, despite the result, was that our team was on its toes. I liked their starts, I liked their comebacks. I liked the fight that they showed and the embracing of those moments. They just didn’t get the job done. The process to me, it doesn’t take away my disappointment, but what makes me more encouraged was that it was a completely different approach. We’re still missing that killer instinct, but we were doing a lot more of the things you need to do in order to get that job done.”

So are they right? Or is being proud of “failing better” symptomatic of the complacent culture for which this franchise perpetually takes heat?

It doesn’t have to be so black and white. To view each first-round elimination on paper as the “same result” is to oversimplify. On top of the obvious improvements in the standings, the 2021-22 Leafs did do plenty of things differently.

After bringing in Spencer Carbery as an assistant coach to remedy the power play, the Leafs…had the NHL’s top power play in 2021-22.

After hiring Dean Chynoweth as an assistant coach to help with their penalty kill, the Leafs…jumped from the NHL’s 24^th-best penalty kill to the eighth-best.

In 5-on-5 play, the Leafs were a top-10 defensive team in most major metrics, from scoring chances against to expected goals against.

“I really believed in a lot of things we did this season, and a lot of the areas that we were looking to grow in, believe me, we grew,” Keefe said. “Individually, looking at players that a year ago didn’t play to their capabilities, to their expectations, we believe they played well. And whether it was through production or through energy and competitiveness and drive, we were right there. There was tremendous growth in a lot of areas of our game.”

In the playoffs, Toronto’s forward group looked the deepest it has during the six-year streak of berths, with the third line of Ilya Mikheyev, Pierre Engvall and David Kampf in particular stepping up. The Leafs rallied from 2-0 deficits in Game 5 and 6. They outshot Tampa 9-5 in the overtime of Game 6 but lost. Toronto never even trailed the series itself until the final horn blew on Game 7.

So there’s room for nuance in assessing this team. It doesn’t make you a sheep to say the Leafs played differently and lost with honor in a series with two teams separated by one goal (24-23), one shot on goal (216-215) and two scoring chances (238-236). While it’s easy to scoff at the Toronto brass for using words like “progress” and “belief” so many times over the past couple days, it’s OK to acknowledge where that thinking comes from.

The question may not actually be whether the Leafs improved in 2021-22. They pretty obviously did. The real question is: was it enough? Even if we acknowledge that it was a “good” year, what happens when your best is still not enough to win a playoff round?

What happens if the Leafs run back a similar roster next year and don’t deliver their best regular season in franchise history and secure home-ice advantage in Round 1 again? What happens if they don’t enter the playoffs the healthiest they’ve been all season again?

They’ll need to be equipped to handle the deep-water warfare better. One could argue that can develop from within. The Washington Capitals of 2017-18 had never advanced past the second round in the first 12 seasons of the Alex Ovechkin era and their biggest roster addition was a sleeper trade-deadline pickup in defenseman Michal Kempny, yet they suddenly just stopped losing and slew the Pittsburgh Penguins minotaur. Yet if we look at other long-scuffling contenders that broke through, from the 1996-97 Red Wings to the 2019-20 Lightning, they made sacrifices. The Lightning, for instance, punted J.T. Miller’s contract in the 2019 offseason and surrendered first-round picks in trades for Blake Coleman and Barclay Goodrow at the 2020 trade deadline.

So the Leafs can express pride over small progress this season and believe the current group can summit the mountain someday, and they may even be right. But they also can’t be stubborn about it.

Their grit up front is restricted to the bottom six, whereas most elite NHL teams have some in their top six. With all due respect to Morgan Rielly’s ability to push offense, the Leafs don’t have a true two-way No. 1 defenseman in the mold of Victor Hedman or Miro Heiskanen. And while pending UFA Jack Campbell had plenty of highs in his rollercoaster tenure in the blue and white, Toronto’s goaltending hasn’t been an X-factor, a potential advantage it held over opponents, since Ed Belfour manned the crease.

And if we can point out obvious holes in the current roster from our armchairs…how can this franchise run it back, exactly as is?

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The Maple Leafs improved. The Maple Leafs need a major change. Why can’t both be true?

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