Bill Clement

The Maple Leafs have missed the playoffs the last three seasons. In Toronto that’s just unheard of. It’s unfathomable. In fact, the last time it happened was 80 years ago when the franchise went through a postseason drought from 1926 to 1928.

So this summer it was time for change. Time for if not a complete rebuild, certainly a pretty significant one. A new coach, Ron Wilson, arrived and some familiar faces that were part of the team’s core — Darcy Tucker, Andrew Raycroft, Kyle Wellwood and Bryan McCabe — departed.

Add to those subtractions the absence of last season’s points, goals and assists leader, Mats Sundin, who is still contemplating if he should return to the NHL, and it sure looked like this season would make life even more miserable for Leafs fans.

But it hasn’t started out that way. Toronto is off to a surprisingly good start. Who would have figured the Leafs to get 14 of their first 26 possible points? Who would have figured that in the first week of November they would be eighth in the Eastern Conference standings after finishing 12th last season? Not many people, maybe not anyone.

Toronto coming out of the gate this impressively raises the very interesting question of can the Maple Leafs keep it up? Can they exceed expectations and most importantly to their faithful, can they end their playoff drought?

Well, let’s start by pointing out an early-season advantage that the Leafs have enjoyed which will soon disappear if it hasn’t already. Over the first month of the schedule the Leafs snuck up on opponents, who weren’t expecting much from them. When a club views an opposing team as being inferior to it, it doesn’t mentally prepare for the confrontation the way it would for a more highly regarded opponent. Thus it was advantage Toronto in October but that should change from November on.

Even with the noise Toronto has made in the early going, it would still shock me if the Leafs make the playoffs, but I’m not ruling that out. A month into the season Toronto stood ahead of Washington, Ottawa and Philadelphia — all of whom I feel are playoff-caliber teams. But it’s a long season and who knows how the fortunes and the health of these teams and others in the Eastern Conference playoff hunt will run.

The aim for the Leafs should be to see if with how they’ve reloaded they can maintain a level of success that keeps them in the chase for a playoff spot going into the final few days of the season. I think they are capable of doing that.

And if they can make a run like that at the postseason — where they are on the playoff bubble coming down the wire — then anything can happen.

This is the hardest working Toronto team since the lockout and that’s primarily because of a couple of reasons: Wilson is an iron-fisted taskmaster and early in the relationship with a new coach every player tries to impress him and earn his approval. So the Leafs are being pushed to bust it by their coach and by themselves since they want as much ice time as they can get from the new man behind the bench.

Ice time is so very important to players as it should be. Whenever I visit a team’s locker room before I work the telecast of a game, I ask players how they are doing and how it’s going. Just by the nature of their answer I can tell how many minutes they are getting.

If I get a tepid answer, it reveals to me the player is getting some playing time but he wants more. If I get it a sort of “things could be better” answer, I know the player is hurting for ice time. And if a player tells me things are great, well, that means he’s getting all the minutes he can handle.

The Leafs are auditioning for their new coach. It’s an open audition that is far from over and it’s one that is designed to bring out the best in them. So far it has done that and it’s no wonder why. Ice time is the oxygen a player needs to breathe. It’s his lifeline to confidence.

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Another thing working in Wilson’s favor as he tries to get the most out of his roster is that the past power brokers in the Toronto locker room are gone. No Sundin, no Tucker, no Raycroft etc. So the coach’s voice is the only one the players are hearing and that’s a good thing.

Also a positive is that without a star player on the team there is no “cast” system and Wilson can without issue go about treating his entire roster equally and that enhances team unity and team chemistry. That under Wilson all Toronto players are created equal is a message the new coach wasted little time in sending. In the team’s third game of the season, Matt Stajan, a young center who is one of the team’s leading scorers and whose play is on the rise, was a healthy scratch. That move caught the attention of the whole team and it conveyed without question that Wilson is not paying any favorites.

Wilson has gone with the “defense-first” approach not just because the Leafs lack overwhelming offensive talent but also because that’s his philosophy. He was that way even when he coached in San Jose and the Sharks had plenty of scorers. He has a very pronounced defensive system, both position-wise and detail-wise. He’s extremely organized and defensively he demands all his players be on the same page.

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