Todd: The Leafs continue to tolerate mediocrity
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The Toronto Maple Leafs have been seeking the answer for so long now, they've forgotten the question.
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What is the purpose of this annual exercise in failure? What is the goal? To put on a show and get good comments in the handshake line? To be satisfied that you took the defending champions to a Game 7 that became an abject exercise in public humiliation?
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Or is it to win a Stanley Cup? You know, that bauble the Canadiens have won 10 times since the Leafs held their last parade.
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A team is an organism, not an assemblage of individual talents. Yet 'team' is exactly the element that is missing in any shot of the Leafs bench. Where the young and enthusiastic Canadiens exude encouragement and mutual support, the Leafs are a disparate group of young men, each alone on his separate island, thinking of contracts or tee times or who knows what.
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Do the ghosts in suits who run this organization still believe their vaunted Core Four can win a Cup? Or is it enough to go through the motions, to put up fat stats and sign even fatter contracts, so long as lobotomized fans are willing to shell out the Gross National Product of Burkina Faso for season tickets?
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What does it do to a team when your arena is a mausoleum for an elimination game and the only sign of life comes from toxic twerp Justin Bieber, dressed for Halloween and having a good giggle with his wife behind the Leafs bench in the midst of this embarrassment?
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Is it conceivable that the cheerleaders at Sportsnet and TSN will begin to hold this team accountable, the way the Canadiens are held accountable in Montreal? Is it acceptable to lose twice at home by 6-1 scores when you are meant to be a bona fide Stanley Cup contender? For the team captain to vanish as completely as Auston Matthews vanishes every spring?
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Even the bellowing of the very scary Craig Berube was not enough to motivate this bunch. Instead, according to the anonymous gent who keeps track of these things, the Leafs have now gone 21,203 days without a Cup. Their failures are mythic.
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Yet the hype machine grinds on, oblivious to reality. Outside southern Ontario, Leafs Elimination Day is an unofficial annual holiday, more so when we can celebrate on the Journée nationale des patriotes et Reine Victoria.
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But for the national media in Toronto, the latest failure is the signal to crank the excuse machine into overdrive. It's unfair to the Leafs, goes the latest line, because they have to face so much pressure, the poor millionaire babies.
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Toronto Star
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