The Toronto Maple Leafs Have Work Ethic Problem
It Doesn't Matter Who the Coach is The Players Don't Want to Work Hard
The Toronto Maple Leafs are among the worst teams in the NHL as we head into Christmas break. Toronto sits at the bottom of the Atlantic Division and dead last in the Eastern Conference with 34 points. This was not the expectation for the Maple Leafs this season.
Most figured they would be at the top of the Atlantic Division as they were last year, despite the loss of Mitch Marner via trade to the Vegas Golden Knights. The Maple Leafs still have Auston Matthews, William Nylander, John Tavares, Matthew Knies, and others to help offensively.
Defensively, the team is the same with Chris Tanev, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Morgan Reilly, Troy Stectcher, Jake McCabe, and Brandon Carlo. In between the pipes, the Maple Leafs had Joseph Woll and Anthony Stolarz written down as the starting tandem.
However, no Woll to begin the year hurt the team. Now, Stolarz is out of the lineup along with Tanev and Carlo. But the issue is that the Maple Leafs should be able to survive these injuries if they just played the right way. And there itself lies the problem.
While the roster changed, becoming grittier and tougher to play against elsewhere in the lineup, things didn’t change for the top guys on the team. They still wanted to play the old style of hockey, not realizing that everything had shifted to the new style Berube wants.
Similar to what we are seeing with the New Jersey Devils, but this is magnified 10 times because of the market these players play in. To be a consistent winner in the NHL, players have to buy into the team's philosophy, and Toronto GM Brad Treliving changed the Maple Leafs identity overnight.
Treliving has owned it, speaking to the media at the quarter mark of the season and even giving the coach a vote of confidence, which was the right decision, as explained on the Rod Pedersen Show back in November.
“I mean, I think it’s the right decision. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the the general manager coming out to give his guy a vote of confidence,” as stated on the Rod Pedersen Show on November 18th, 2025. “Like, let’s be honest, the team on the ice is not good. And he’s owned responsibility for putting this team together, right? They knew they were going to be different. There was going to be—no Mitch Mner.”
Many experts believed that Marner bore too much of the blame for the Maple Leafs' playoff failures and that the team would regret not having him on the roster. Matthews and Nylander needed him as they are facing the opposition’s best each night.
Tavares is doing his best to pull his weight, but he can’t be the Maple Leafs best player at his age. So the offense is missing a fourth and maybe a fifth. Even with an addition to the top six, will it matter when it comes to the compete level and effort, which have been the problems for this team for years?
No effort, pushback, or heart show they are an easy team to play against. It is the same old story we have seen from this group, especially from the top players on the Maple Leafs, in crunch time of the playoffs. When the games get harder, they fold. These players have yet to embrace the hard work that is associated with winning.
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We have seen numerous players on the team, including Anthony Stolarz, call out their teammates after a loss for how they played in certain situations. Recently, there have been too many nights this season when head coach Craig Berube has needed to call out his players for their play.
“They played with more passion they we did tonight (Thursday night in Washington). That is what it boils down to,” Berube told the Toronto Maple Leafs media on Thursday. “They had way more urgency in their game. More passion in their game. That’s the difference.”
When Berube was asked why this keeps happening, he responded, “Ask those guys, not me.”
For a team that got to Game 7 of Round 2 last year in the Stanley Cup Playoffs against the Florida Panthers, Toronto has undoubtedly become a shell of its former self. Maybe this is the adversity this group needed to go through all along. Struggle to make the playoffs, if they even do this year.
It is a similar path to when Paul Maurice took over the Panthers in his first. The players needed a whole to change from being this up-tempo team to this grinded-out team that suffocated you into submission. But the Panthers had the pieces to do that. The Maple Leafs don’t.
Not to mention Aleksander Barkov, the captain of the Florida Panthers, set the tone in the room for the players and the buy-in on how they need to play every night. What is going on in Toronto? It feels like there is a disconnect between the coach and the players.
Berube tells the media on Saturday, after the Maple Leafs loss to the Predators, that there is a mental aspect to their current struggles and that they can’t hold leads. Meanwhile, the captain of the team, Auston Matthews, doesn’t think it is a mental thing.
But it clearly is a mental thing and has been a mental thing for this group for many years. Just look at how they perform in elimination games in the playoffs. They have a mindset of playing not to lose instead of playing to win. And that mindset has carried over into the start of this season.
If the Toronto Maple Leafs aren’t playing the right way, they won't have success. Don’t expect a coaching change either. What is that going to solve? Since Matthews was drafted by the Maple Leafs in 2016, Toronto has gone through Mike Babcock, Sheldon Keefe, and now Berube. All have tried to get the players to play a certain way, and they can’t do it.
It is on the players to buy in fully to what Craig Berube wants from them, especially the top players on the team. How many more times are they going to need a kick in the pants to play better?
This isn’t Dallas, where the Stars could get away with it with Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn multiple years in a row. But at some point, that got tiresome too. Top players know what is expected of them.
Until the top players realize they are not talented enough to win on talent alone, the Toronto Maple Leafs will continue to struggle and fail to achieve the success many expected.
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