A week ago, the Toronto Maple Leafs were caught up in a classic Leafs crisis: A little thing that threatened to blow up into a big thing as it swirled around television and talk radio.
Gavin McKenna, the first overall pick and Toronto's next big star, had been benched. Except he hadn't been benched - at least, not in the conventional sense. He sat on the bench, yes, for the second half of a brutal 5-4 loss to the Buffalo Sabres after the Leafs had been up 4-2, but new coach Jim Hiller said the teenager hadn't done anything wrong.
The Leafs had taken a series of penalties, and McKenna is not a penalty killer, Hiller explained. Hiller thought about putting him back in but "just in that moment made the decision not to." And after McKenna had sat for so long, the coach "didn't want to put him in a bad spot."
It was all a bit odd. Hiller seemed surprised to discover that McKenna had played fewer than seven minutes as the Leafs blew that lead. Days of speculation followed: Was the Leafs' prized asset already out of favor? Was this a Mike Babcock-Mitch Marner thing all over again?
Er, probably not.
After dropping another game to the New York Islanders, the Maple Leafs responded to the mini-controversy with their best stretch of the season by some distance. They've won three in a row in regulation after Thursday's 5-4 victory over the New York Rangers at Scotiabank Arena. Troy Stecher's last-minute goal - seriously, Troy Stecher - sent the Leafs' bench into fits of joy, an emotion that's been in short supply around this team for much of the previous two seasons.
It's easy enough to see how that might have happened. After the Leafs fired head coach Sheldon Keefe at the end of the 2024 playoffs, they brought in Craig Berube as his replacement. He preached a low-event brand of hockey that was supposed to make the Maple Leafs tougher to play against, but it also stifled the offensive output of their talented forwards. The whole thing cratered last season, and Berube and general manager Brad Treliving lost their jobs.
A month into this campaign, everyone appears to be having fun again.
Captain Auston Matthews, the subject of trade talk for much of the summer after his worst season, has eight goals and 18 points in a dozen games and looks fully healthy for the first time in recent memory. Kirill Marchenko - acquired by trading power forward Matthew Knies on the eve of the season because new GM John Chayka doesn't believe in the concept of power forwards - has five goals in his last five games and looks increasingly comfortable on Matthews' wing. William Nylander remains William Nylander, picking up where he left off after a career-best season last year.
And McKenna, quasi-benching aside, has shown flashes of the talent that made him the consensus top pick, with three goals and seven points in 12 games. Perhaps more importantly, he has seemed relatively at ease in the Toronto market, joking with the media about his scoring slump after failing to find the net in his first three games in the NHL.
There is a retro quality to this version of the Leafs: They're heavily tilted toward skill at the forward positions and capable of scoring goals in bunches. But just like those teams of the early Matthews years, they come with plenty of questions about goal prevention. The defense is old and thin, especially with the loss of Chris Tanev to injury. Speaking of old, the goaltending duo of Sergei Bobrovsky and Anthony Stolarz has been iffy, with neither posting a save percentage above .900. Bobrovsky, the 38-year-old free-agent acquisition, obviously wasn't signed to win games in October, but Toronto can't wait all season for him to find his usual spring form.
If nothing else, the Maple Leafs are interesting again. They went through entire seasons where everyone was just waiting to see if they could finally get over the playoff hump. (Narrator: They couldn't.) But that's no longer the big question. Between the coaching change, the roster overhaul engineered by Chayka, and Mats Sundin, the new executive with unspecified duties, this is a whole new Leafs operation.
There is enough high-end skill to put points on the board and make the Leafs dangerous to play against, especially now that they're free of Berube's wet-blanket style. But there's also enough uncertainty about the back end to make the Leafs dangerous to themselves.
After all those organizational changes, that's a pretty funny result. A Maple Leafs team that scores a lot but has a shaky defense? Groundbreaking.
Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.
