Old, big and slow is no answer for last-place Maple Leafs

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This is a new place for Auston MatthewsWilliam Nylander and Morgan Rielly: Last place.

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They played together for nine seasons on the Maple Leafs, averaging 104 points per season, with teams rarely in danger of missing the playoffs, teams known for strong regular seasons and shortened postseasons.

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The only active team in hockey that has reached the playoffs for nine years in a row.

It's 10th grade and everything is falling apart. The Leafs are in last place in the Eastern Conference. after finishing first in the Atlantic Division in Craig Berube's first season as head coach.

They look old, big and slow at the same time, and that's Animal House the hockey equivalent of a fat, drunk, stupid person with no direction in life, son.

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Animal House it was funny. The current Maple Leafs are not. Sometimes they look like Danger! the participant on the ice is frozen, without answers and questions that sound like answers.

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And now it's five games on the road for the Leafs, all against the Eastern Conference teams ahead of them in the standings. And all this happens before they return home to play back-to-back games against Nikita Kucherov, McLean Celebrini, Connor McDavid, Connor Bedard and Sidney Crosby.

The leaves are stuck somewhere they may not be able to escape. This might be one of those years (every team seems to have one) that the Leafs had in the pre-Matthews era.

Rielly experienced some of that in his first seasons in Toronto. He was here for Peter Horacek. He was here for Brian Burke and Dave Nonis. He grew up losing in the NHL.

Not recently. Almost a decade has not passed. Now the cracks are everywhere and there's not much to believe in around the Leafs.

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General manager Brad Treliving hasn't had his best season. He invited Nicolas Roy, Dakota Joshua and Mathias McKelly to deepen the Leafs, and no one really helped.

Roy earned a sterling reputation during his years with the Vegas Golden Knights, but little of what made him so highly regarded in Vegas was not evident in his first season with the Leafs.

The Leafs and Coach Berube wanted a third line, a meaningful line, this season. To win the Stanley Cup the way Florida did, you need a line of Anton Lundell, Eetu Luostarinen and Brad Marchand. You need a Yanni Gourde line like Tampa had in their championship seasons.

Roy would center this line for the Leafs. He's in pain now, but even when he was playing, nothing special happened.

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It's not just Roy with the Leafs. That's pretty much the entire lineup, with the exception of John Tavares, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, and the occasional appearance from Nylander.

Captain Matthews suffered another mysterious injury. He's expected to play in Columbus on Wednesday, but if ever there was a test of his captaincy and leadership on the ice, this is it. He's been watching from above for two weeks now. He hasn't had to be an alpha leader in the past, but now the Leafs need him to be Superman.

Cliff Fletcher said that you can largely determine how a team is doing by dividing players into categories: Who is performing to expectations? Who performs above expectations? Who is performing below expectations? Then count.

The Leafs have Tavares and OEL on the expectation list above, and remember, Ekman-Larsson was the sixth defenseman on Florida's championship team two years ago.

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In the list of expectations below, you can start with captain Matthews and injured goalie Anthony Stolarz. You can add defenseman Rielly to the list, his partner Brandon Carlo before he got injured; with Chris Tanev before he got injured; Jake McCabe, who may have been injured; and defenseman Simon Benoit, and that's not good.

Early on, you might want to add the injured Roy to a list that includes Joshua; Leafs voodoo doll Max Domi; and the inconsistent Calle Jarnkrok and Bobby McMann.

Do the math. When you have about 12 players out of 20 expected to dress every night, performing below expectations, and management failing, and the coaching staff looking for answers they might not find, this is what you get: Last Place.

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And who knows who Joseph Wall is and what he is capable of at this moment? Goaltending depth has been a strength for the Leafs early in the season. Now there is no depth, and who can say how much power?

What do you need to do to get out of this? Over the last nine years that the Leafs have made the playoffs, the eighth-place team has needed an average of 94 points to make the playoffs.

The Leafs have 60 games to play. They'll need to go 37-23 to get close to the playoffs and 38-22 to secure a spot in the Stanley Cup.

That comes after losing Game 7 last spring and four other Game 7s on this road trip that no longer includes team president Brendan Shanahan.

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There are still few teams in hockey that can compete with the top four of Matthews, Nylander, Tavares and Matthew Nice, but the top four don't seem to be winning anything in the NHL.

You need 10 players, 12 or 15 on the same page, playing the same, playing defense with structure, positioning, smarts and active sticks.

The Leafs looked like underdogs against Montreal on Saturday night, but that's nothing new. They looked lost in Detroit in the second game of the season, and they looked pretty lost almost every time they played a team that attacks fast and passes vertically.

It was a 22-game losing season. The first of three to play all nine playoff seasons together. Last place is a first for the Maple Leafs. When the walls come down.

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