The end of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ “Core Four,” the most prolific flops in hockey

The hockey gods have conspired to overthrow Mother Nature in the city of Toronto for the past seven years: the Leafs are a spectacle to behold in the winter, then fall in the spring.

Star winger Mitch Marner has been dealt from the Toronto Maple Leafs to the Las Vegas Golden Knights in a sign-and-trade deal on the dawn of his pending free agency, ending what became known as the “Core Four” era in Toronto. This period will be remembered for impressive regular season showings followed by unrelenting letdowns in the playoffs.

The Leafs’ long-suffering fan base has endured many hardships and heartbreaks during our 58-year Stanley Cup drought, the longest streak in the National Hockey League. The calamitous reign of owner Harold Ballard in the 1970s and ’80s. Kerry Fraser’s missed call on a blatant Wayne Gretzky high stick in 1993 — just before The Great One would score a game-winning goal. Making the mediocre Artūrs Irbe (.899% career save percentage) look like Martin Brodeur, Carey Price, Sergei Bobrovsky, or Andrei Vasilevskiy — while getting goalie’d by all of those Hall of Fame-worthy netminders in the postseason, as well. 

And, of course, “It was 4-1.”

Call it the Centennial Curse: the Leafs, the biggest team in the most hockey-crazed nation in the world, haven’t hoisted the most iconic trophy in sports since Canada turned 100.

My favorite team didn’t even make the playoffs from the time I started high school through when I graduated from university. 

But what makes these past seven years perhaps more painful than anything else for myself and the rest of the Leafs faithful is that it came despite (or perhaps because of) the collection of elite talent atop the roster. First overall pick and captain Auston Matthews, 2022 NHL MVP and the top goal scorer in the league since his career began. Another No. 1 overall pick: the stoic, steady John Tavares, who returned home to Toronto after starring with the New York Islanders and captained the team from 2019 until passing the torch to Matthews last season. Another hometown kid, fourth overall draft pick Mitch Marner, a wizard with the puck on his stick — the Robin to Matthews’ Batman. And second-generation NHLer William Nylander, an eighth overall pick who’s blossomed into an unflappable sniper.

It’s the hope that kills you.

With the help of Hockey Reference, we ran through every season of every NHL team since the 1993-94 regular season to find all examples of high-octane cores, which we defined as a group of four players who each average at least 0.8 era-adjusted points per game for a period of at least three consecutive seasons (with a minimum of 0.5 points per game in each individual season, and workarounds made in cases of injuries that caused any members to miss more than half a season). We used era-adjusted points to account for variation in league-wide scoring rates over time.

This chart compares the longevity of high-octane cores (in terms of number of qualifying seasons, minimum three) with the highest number of wins each group achieved in the playoffs, from a minimum of zero to a maximum of 16 (winning the Stanley Cup).

This iteration of the Leafs stands out for having the longest-tenured core of consistently highly productive players. The recent edition of the Pittsburgh Penguins has made even less happen in the playoffs despite Sidney Crosby defying Father Time, but all four of that power quartet have won Cups — and most have taken home multiple. The Anaheim Ducks circa the tail end of Teemu Selänne’s sparkling career and the Winnipeg Jets starring Mark Scheifele, Kyle Connor, Blake Wheeler, and Nik Ehlers achieved a similar mix of regular season scoring prowess along with playoff futility as this Leafs group, but with two fewer kicks at the can as a high-octane core in the postseason.

By contrast, the six seasons that the Chicago Blackhawks’ Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, Patrick Sharp, and Marian Hossa spent racking up massive point totals together resulted in three Stanley Cup victories.

What separates this Leafs group from the Jets, Ducks, or Pens is the relative productivity of the quartet.

This chart compares the average points per game for each player in a high-octane core to their team’s playoff success. Again, the Leafs stand out unfavorably.

On average, members of this “Core Four” generated 1.15 era-adjusted points per game apiece during their seven seasons together — and never got even halfway to winning the Stanley Cup. Teams with a power quartet that scores this much are more likely to either have won a Stanley Cup or played for one in Game 7 than not.

The long faces for the Leafs in the handshake line have come much sooner. Their stars have underperformed in the playoffs, especially late in series. The resources spent to accumulate this talent — all four are in the 12 biggest salary cap hits this past season, including the top slot for Auston Matthews — have made it more difficult to add complementary depth pieces to support the team’s stars.

There is likely no high-profile sports franchise on the planet, outside maybe FC Barcelona, that was as adversely affected by the pandemic as the Leafs. The challenge of adding secondary scoring down the lineup was compounded by the resultant freeze in the salary cap.

Sometimes all that’s needed is one major addition or change of scenery to put a team over the top. No one knows that better than Brendan Shanahan, the former Leafs president who was let go at the end of the past season. The star winger’s move from the Hartford Whalers to the Detroit Red Wings during the 1996-97 season was what finally brought a Motown roster that had long been littered with Hall of Famers to the Promised Land — or rather, Ice.

No singular game changer like that is available for the Leafs, at least not in free agency. Marner was the top pending free agent on the board, and Leaf-killer Brad Marchand — who would have marked a distinct DNA shift for the team with his feisty style of play — already opted to re-up with the Florida Panthers.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, well, the Leafs’ brass has effectively been forcibly evicted from the asylum with Marner’s departure. 

The travails of the last seven seasons have been enough to remove any tinge of earnestness from the half-jesting mantra of Leafs fans: “PLAN THE PARADE!” 

Many, including this one, are now muttering a darker refrain: “Just one before I die.”