In a few years, by finishing near the bottom of the 32 team league, they might acquire a few players that in the draw will allow them to make the playoffs, but they will shortly acquiese and disappear quickly after the first series.
Owners who want to be seen as diligent and as, "doing something about the problem" will continue to fire coaches, general managers, trainers, assistants, publicity flacks and Zamboni drivers at an ever-increasing rate.
The Leafs will continue to metamorph otherwise competent professional hockey players into Nervous Nellies who won't have the confidence to play a vigorous game of road hockey with 10 year olds.
Owners will post apologies before, during and after the season, and will employ writers to come up with unique ways of saying, "We stink, stank and stunk!"
Why? Expectation. Expectation that whatever Miracle-On-Ice team a harried GM puts together will erase 30, 35, 40 or 45 years of failure by miraculously leapfrogging into Lord Stanley contenders.
Players come to Toronto with a pedigree, confidence in their skills, be they a knack for scoring, playmaking, defense or goaltending. Within a couple of years they have become lifeless, slackjawed shells of their formers selves, tossed aside for the next wunderkind who is introduced to Toronto media like a sacrificial lamb.
One of the requirements of future Leaf players should be that, like Eddie Shack, they cannot read. How else might a player survive with ego intact, with upwards of 30 sportswriters putting them under the microscope and finding them deficient in one category or another on a daily basis? And the ubiquitous "posters" - even more ruthless in their appraisals of talent which they themselves neither showed on the ice nor with pen in hand. Or bloggers.
Can any newbie live up to the fame and lore established 40 and 50 years ago by names such as Syl Apps, Teeder Kennedy, Bill Barilko, Tim Horton or Bobby Baun?
Even the Leaf motto "Defeat does not rest lightly upon their shoulders" rings of negativism.
There is hope, however. The Leafs, if they are to succeed, must become a national laughingstock, a joke, the brunt of comments by politicians and of boos from the 19,000 plus fans who jam the Air Canada Centre every game; or the millions throughout the land who clamber aboard the Leaf bandwagon each Fall, only to claim in April they were secretly Montreal or Pittsburgh or Washington fans.
And when this persona is established, and there are no aspirations, and they have truly given up all hope, and have resorted to lengthy on-ice prayer following the National Anthem, then they might , strictly by chance, put together a compatible team that is loose and confident, a team with no expectations, which no longer plays a tentative, get-rid-of-the-puck and scrambly game.
A team that can play like it actually enjoys being at the ACC, not anywhere but.
A team that wins.
With billboards saying, "Free lapdance during all Leaf playoff games" and "It must be Spring, the Leafs are out" they are close to this laughingstock requirement.
Now all they have to do now is fire the GM, all their star players and the Zamboni driver.
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