Leafs GM Brad Treliving reflects on team’s disappointing start: ‘Too much vanilla’

TORONTO – Brad Treliving isn’t planning on making a coaching change. 

The Maple Leafs general manager has also had plenty of sleepless nights — and knows answers for his scuffling hockey club will likely have to come from within the locker room’s four walls.

Treliving met with reporters Tuesday ahead of his team’s matchup against the St. Louis Blues with Toronto on a five-game slide, including four regulation losses, to sit an ugly 8-9-2 on a campaign that began with Stanley Cup talk. 

“We’re not where we want to be,” Treliving said in his opening remarks. “We’ve underperformed to this point, and I take full responsibility. I’m in charge of the hockey department. I’ve put the people in place — on the ice, off the ice.”

Treliving added he has “all the faith” in head coach Craig Berube and his staff.

“I’ve seen what he’s done in the past,” Treliving said of the Cup-winner with St. Louis in 2019. “I’ve got a belief in the messaging that he’s given. Craig didn’t become a bad coach overnight.

“The way out of it, to me, is not pointing fingers, but digging in together.”

The Leafs have been a mess in their own zone this season, and owned the NHL’s second-worst goals-against average at 3.79 heading into Tuesday. 

Toronto has failed to meet expectations, and is now dealing with a rash of injuries, including to star centre Auston Matthews, goaltender Anthony Stolarz and shutdown defenceman Chris Tanev. Also currently sidelined are forwards Scott Laughton and Nicolas Roy, along with blueliner Brandon Carlo.

“Our record is indicative of how we’ve played,” said Treliving, who said Matthews could return Saturday. “We’re in the results business, but there’s nights that you play well and lose, (and) there’s nights that you just score more than the opponent … but you haven’t played well. 

“Far too often, even in games that we’ve won, we haven’t won the game. Sometimes we’ve scored more goals.” 

Treliving pointed to a disconnect in the message of a hard-nosed, north-south system from behind the bench that can be effective, but far from flashy, and how it’s being received.

“It comes back to the inconsistency,” he said. “It’s always the big question in sport, right? ‘Why don’t you just go do it?’ That’s what we have to work through.”

The Leafs, who were harder to play against and solid if not spectacular in their own zone last season, entered Tuesday having allowed the fifth-most shots in the league at 31.2, while a once-feared power play sat 26th at 16.0 per cent.

“Just because you did it last year or last week doesn’t make it that you’re just going to do it,” Treliving said. “You’ve got to dig in. You have to do it.”

Toronto’s defensive game has been shambolic much of the schedule, with an increasingly frustrated Berube continuing to implore his players to give him more.

“There’s been too much vanilla,” Treliving said. “When you’re going well, you have a really good indication — there’s going to be good nights and bad nights — but you have a pretty good idea how it’s going to look like from night to night. 

“A large part of the frustration is you don’t know how it’s going to look.” 

The club’s goaltending has also been below par — its crease, to be fair, has been under siege many nights — with Stolarz carrying a heavy load before suffering an upper-body injury last week. The 31-year-old put up excellent numbers splitting time with Joseph Woll last season, but was pressed into action more than the organization would have liked this season with Woll away from the group for “personal family reasons” until recently.

Treliving, who has already used plenty of draft and prospect capital in trades to build the current roster, said the answers are likely going to have to come from within.

“We’re not going to just go panic and start throwing things overboard,” he said. “It’s not so much an individual thing as much as it’s a team thing right now. Put anybody in the uniform and playing the way we’re playing, we’re probably going to have the same result.”

Hired by the Leafs in May 2023 after previous GM Kyle Dubas lost a power struggle with then-president Brendan Shanahan, Treliving fired Sheldon Keefe and brought Berube on board the following spring.

Berube guided Toronto to a 108-point regular season in 2024-25 and just the franchise’s second trip to the second round of the playoffs in the NHL’s salary cap era.

But a summer of change followed, with star winger Mitch Marner forcing his way out of Toronto in a sign-and-trade deal with the Vegas Golden Knights that was nothing short of an organizational disaster from an asset-management perspective.

The Leafs tried to fill holes left by Marner — an elite talent with the ability to influence the game all over the ice — by committee, but the likes of Roy, Matias Maccelli and Dakota Joshua haven’t made the desired impact.

“You have to have patience in this job,” Treliving said. “But patience isn’t inactivity.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 18, 2025.