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The Official Post-Bitch 2025-26 Regular Season Thread

LeafGm said:
I largely agree with this analysis, though also disagree a bit on Matthews. He’s part of the problem too and consistently hasn’t been good enough in the playoffs.

Does that mean he’s been a playoff ghost? Or a bigger cause of our playoff failures than the shit depth he’s been surrounded with? No.

But never, not in any single playoff run in his career have we ever seen the dominant, 60-70-goal version of Matthews, or a heater where he puts up the kind of stupid numbers a guy like McDavid’s started to put up every playoff run now. Fuck, he struggles to even score at a point-a-game pace. He’s only managed that twice in nine career playoff runs, and only barely.

That said, GEEMAN’s “tear everything down & trade everything away & tank forever & fuck it, just fold the franchise” strategy is still pants-on-head-stupid, of course. As long as you’ve still got Auston under contract, you keep trying & hope he’ll put it all together in one magical playoff run, like Ovechkin.
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They made him play like David Kampf instead of Auston Matthews. They should have let them play high event hockey instead of neutering their strengths. Poor coaching and organizational philosophy meant we never got to see the best the core 4 had to offer. McDavid, Kucherov, MacKinnon, etc never had to play like tha.
 
GEEMAN said:
Stop this bullshit
Your core players failed miserably every fucken playoff year when it matters.

You had countless opportunities to win but your guns never performed in the clutch .
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Matthews and Nylander, the two players who we still have here making "core" money both have overall good playoff production records despite our coaches continuous use of Matthews as a primary matchup centre, no one likes to talk about him shutting down every Oppo 1C we've played in years while putting up 35/80 paces of his own. Including their play in the clutch.

I've gone over the numbers a bunch of times, if you want to jam your stupid fingers in your stupid ears, have at it. Every fucking year our core matches or out produces the opposition core while our depth gets crushed and muppets like you take it as proof that our core can't win. The idea that top players are supposed to be elite in every series they play in or their team automatically loses is silly, and just isn't supported by history. Every fucking year the cup winner has series where members of their core don't produce offensively. Florida's run last year is a good example. Tkachuk went scoreless against us and none of their core forwards had more than 2 goals or 5 points in the 7 game series and no one cares because their deadline addition was a superstar against us and the 3rd line he was on deep dicked us for 7 goals & 20 points combined in the series.

This all has been pointed out a bunch of times here over the years. Our big guns appear to disappear in the clutch because we lose 2-1 games where the only goal comes from one of our big guns while the team beating us gets goals from Jonah Gadjovich, Nick Paul, Corey Perry, Paul Byron, etc, etc, etc while getting minimal production from their core forwards in those games....because that's how this game works most of the time.
 
Between 2019 and 2025, the Leafs played in 13 games in which they could eliminate the team they were playing from the playoffs.
The Leafs won exactly 2 of those 13.
 
Losing Mitch really led us to better things.

Can't wait to lose matthews and nylander too.
 
just such a moronic chain reaction.

spend 2nd line prices on 4th liners and then there's no room on the 4th line to call up cheap ahlers.

dubas was the first to stop it.....but he got so fucked by the cap freeze that we never had any extra roster spots to make those callups either. fuck.
 
Would love to see Chadwick get a look up here too to end the year.

Smith and Sharpe both look semi interesting too.
 
Villeneuve is the Marlies all time leader in dman points. Steeves was the Marlies all time leader in goals.

Not because of their elite production but because 100% of players in their position get cups of coffee in the NHL and they didn’t for no reason other than the GM likes teriyaki pizza.
 
Funny that people are hung up on steeves. He has 3 g and 6 pts in his last ~30 gp

They weren’t wrong on the guy - he’s not good - but the point remains that it’s stupid to not see what these guys can do for the sake of 30 year old 4th liners.
 
mbow30 said:
Funny that people are hung up on steeves. He has 3 g and 6 pts in his last ~30 gp
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Sure, but is on pace for just under 20G/82 in 12 minutes a game while having the best xG among all Boston forwards. The exact type of forward you want your system churning out for cheap so that you never, ever feel the need to add a Jarnkrok, Joshua, Domi, etc. Spending league min on him to give the same (or better) performance than a 2-3 million dollar bottom 6'er is how you afford to add real talent to your core group when it comes available in free agency or at the deadline.

We had guys like Steeves, McMann, and Holmberg in the AHL while guys like Simmonds, ZAR, Ritchie, Blackwell, Clifford, etc were getting reps. It's not even specifically about the the young guys we didn't give opportunity to (or waited way too long to finally give opportunity to), it's about the ongoing thought in the organization that waiver wire scrubs and cast offs from other organizations were a better option than giving our kids opportunity. We had 30-40 games to give to any piece of shit 13th forward from any non playoff team in the fucking league, but a 22-24 yr old in our own organization scoring at a 60-80pt pace in the AHL? Nah.
 
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