NHL
The Maple Leafs did not look good against the Devils. What's going on? John E. Sokolowski / Imagn Images
The Toronto Blue Jays won a huge Game 7 and set the city on fire with excitement Monday as they moved on to the World Series.
A night later, the Toronto Maple Leafs lost their own Game 7 — the seventh game of the 2025-26 season — and the city … yawned and rolled over as it awaits more baseball later in the week?
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The Leafs are now 3-3-1 after an ugly 5-2 loss to the New Jersey Devils on Tuesday. Sure, it’s early. But it’s not too early for a few thoughts on where they’re at and where they need to go before a mediocre start turns into something worse.
So let’s try to walk the line between overreacting to a small sample and drawing some early conclusions from what we’ve seen.
I didn’t have a problem with the way Anthony Stolarz threw down the gauntlet in his postgame comments after Saturday’s loss to the Seattle Kraken. It was nice, frankly, to see some genuine emotion from a Leafs player after a game didn’t go their way.
But after a lot of talk about how they’d move past it and be better, they weren’t in a big game against the Devils.
They were dead. Flat as a pancake. Again.
At a minimum, I expected the Leafs to try to play more physically, more like they did in the playoffs against the Ottawa Senators and Florida Panthers. Throw a few hits. Have a couple of post-whistle scrums and fights. Crash the crease.
Instead, they turned in another lifeless performance, one in which they were hemmed in their own end, couldn’t get in on the forecheck and took bad penalties (including a ridiculously bad goalie interference challenge). The Devils looked faster, more skilled and, well, just better.
So much for the mini-controversy stirring up some emotion early on. And for some of the Jays’ magic pixie dust wearing off on them.
The buzzword of the Leafs’ offseason wasn’t “killer instinct” this time around. It was “DNA change,” after some interesting phrasing by general manager Brad Treliving following last spring’s disappointing playoff exit.
With a lot of cap flexibility, he added some bigger bodies in the offseason (Nic Roy, Dakota Joshua and Michael Pezzetta) and a small playmaker (Matias Maccelli) but otherwise kept the roster largely the same.
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At this early stage, however, if Toronto’s DNA has changed, it’s been for the worse. There’s already a lot of talk in the market about what the Leafs’ identity is supposed to be, as without Mitch Marner and more money injected down the lineup, it’s proving difficult to lean on their skill to pull out wins when they’re outplayed. They’re regularly getting outshot, out-chanced and outskated … and not giving their opponents a rough ride while doing so.
You wonder at times watching this if this group can play coach Craig Berube’s system and win another way — and if this is really going to be the path to being better in the playoffs.
There’s been a bit of heat building on the newcomers, and that’s fair enough.
Roy, Joshua and Maccelli have combined for only two goals and 5 points, well off the production they’ve had in the past and the amount their salaries dictate they’ll need to produce to be successful additions.
Roy, strangely, has been used sparingly despite being the best of the bunch. He’s averaging 12:24 per game, which is ninth among Leafs forwards. With the Vegas Golden Knights the past four years, the big centre averaged 15:48 per game and produced an average of 17 goals and 41 points per 82 games played. That stretch includes the year they won the Stanley Cup.
Getting him more involved should be step No. 1 here, as this is a forward group with a lot of underperformers early.
Joshua and Maccelli feel like tougher fixes given their skill sets, but sticking with them and giving them opportunities with skilled players makes some sense, given their previous success with the Vancouver Canucks and Arizona Coyotes.
Until Treliving can strike a deal to bring in another top-six forward, Berube is going to have to try to coax as much as he can out of these three — and they’ve shown to be better contributors in the past, not to mention more useful than some of the incumbents.
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As much as there’s talk about the three new skaters, the reality is that most of this team is identical to the one that played for Berube in the playoffs last year. It has the same No. 1 goaltender, three identical pairs on D and nine forwards who have all returned. The Leafs shouldn’t look this disjointed by the addition of three depth forwards who are playing fairly limited minutes.
There have been a few bright spots — Morgan Rielly, Bobby McMann and John Tavares look good to my eye — but they need more from the holdovers here.
The new forwards aren’t responsible, for example, for the power play being so inept or the blue line struggling to move the puck. They’re also not the reason the top line has posted such mediocre underlying numbers, even if you account for Maccelli’s unsuccessful audition with Matthew Knies and Auston Matthews.
“I don’t feel like they have any sustained pressure in the offensive zone at all,” Berube said of his top unit after Tuesday’s loss, which was an especially bad showing for Max Domi.
No, they do not. And that’s a huge problem.
This team won a lot of games and finished atop a difficult division last season. And the Leafs have had plenty of tough starts early in seasons and rallied for strong Novembers and Decembers to turn things around by the midway point.
Even with the power play a mess, they’re seventh in scoring league-wide with 3.43 goals per game. Stolarz has had some standout performances in net. William Nylander looks dangerous (sometimes at both ends), Tavares is spry and Matthews appears to be healthier.
This could just be some early-season blahs as they realign without a core piece.
That said, we have to put their struggles so far in context: The Leafs may have the softest early schedule in the league, with only two of their first 15 games against last year’s playoff teams and 12 of their first 16 at home.
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The 2025-26 schedule is very condensed for every team with the Olympic break coming in February, and Toronto is going to get hammered with a ton of weird trips and tougher opponents the rest of the way once it gets through this easy stretch.
If the Leafs continue to fritter away points against teams that didn’t make the playoffs last year, they could put themselves in a hole that will be challenging to get out of as the degree of difficulty increases.
They’re already down Joseph Woll and Scott Laughton, and it appears as though Chris Tanev could miss time after a blow to the head against the Devils. For a back end that has already been taking on water, that’s going to be a real test, as this team remains thin on the right side.
The Leafs weathered a lot of injuries up front early on last year to have a big second half en route to a 108-point season a year ago. That’s going to be far more challenging to do this time around, for several reasons, and they can’t count on getting .920 goaltending and winning a zillion one-goal games again.
The bottom line is they need to play a more fundamentally sound game. If they’re still 23rd in possession and in the bottom half of the league in expected goals and high-danger chances allowed a few months from now, this is going to be a long, challenging season.
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James Mirtle is a senior writer covering the NHL for The Athletic. James joined The Athletic as the inaugural editor in Canada in 2016 and served as senior managing editor of The Athletic NHL for four years. Previously, he spent 12 years as a sportswriter with The Globe and Mail. A native of Kamloops, B.C., he appears regularly on Sportsnet 590 The Fan and other radio stations across Canada. Follow James on Twitter @mirtle
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