A guide to this year's Leafs season for Blue Jays fans who are just tuning in now

If you’re a Toronto sports fan, you’ve had a busy fall. You watched the Blue Jays stumble down the stretch in September, only to find their footing just in time to win the AL East on the regular season’s final day. Then you watched them handle the Yankees in the ALDS before coming back to beat the Mariners in a thrilling Game 7 classic in the ALCS. That led to one of the greatest World Series ever played, with the underdog Jays giving the fat cat Dodgers all they could handle before losing a heart-breaking winner-take-all showdown, literally coming just inches away from a championship.

After all of that, you probably needed some time off to recover. But now the snow has arrived, and it’s time to turn your attention back to that other blue-and-white team that’s still playing. Right, the Maple Leafs, that’s what they’re called. It’s time to start watching them again.

So, you may be wondering: How are the Leafs doing?

Let’s get you caught up, with my special guide to the Maple Leafs season for Blue Jays fans who haven’t been paying attention because of the whole agonizing championship near-miss thing. We’ll do this in a Q+A format, and by the end you’ll be back up to speed on everything you missed.

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NHL weekend rankings: A tale of two Rangers, plus a bottom five shakeup

In the hockey world, any no-talent hack can cry about how bad things are. But it takes true visionary to focus on the positive. And so far this season, there’s been a lot of positive stories to talk about. Since I’m known as a big sunshine and optimism type of guy, let’s take a few minutes to recognize a very solid first month of the seasons.

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The "Rule of Cool"? Loaning stars to other teams? NHL Rules Court is back in session

It’s time for another session of Rules Court, the feature where you make the case for any kind of change that you think would improve the NHL, and a jury of three of us votes on it. Convince at least two of us, and… well, nothing happens, but you get to feel like you’re not quite so alone in the world. That’s important, right? Sure it is.

This time around, we’ve got the usual jury of Shayna Goldman, Sean McIndoe, and Sean Gentille. We have seven of your proposals to consider, plus a bonus suggestion that will show up in today’s newsletter. (Subscribe now!) Last time, you were only able to get two of your proposals through. Will you do any better this time? Let’s find out, because court is now in session.

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Re-evaluating the HHOF cases for John Tavares, Jamie Benn, Corey Perry and more

It’s Hall of Fame induction week, and the class of 2025 is an interesting one. Of the four players on the men’s side, we had two absolute locks (Zdeno Chara and Joe Thornton), plus one guy who was very close (Duncan Keith) and another who should have been (Alexander Mogilny). While you never quite know how the committee will judge a candidate, all four players absolutely felt like future Hall-of-Famers midway through their careers.

Many eventual HHOFers fit that pattern. That said, it’s possible for a player to feel like a borderline candidate in their prime, only to have the sort of finishing kick that flips them to a sure thing. We saw that with Marc-Andre Fleury, who I had as “not there yet” back in 2019 when he was already well into his mid-30s, but who added a Vezina to his trophy case two years later to seal the deal. Fellow goalie Sergei Bobrovsky was “very” close as recently as early 2024, then won back-to-back Cups and is essentially a lock. And in 2019, Shea Weber was a strong candidate who felt like he just needed to close the case – which he emphatically did with the Habs 2021 playoff run, leading to his induction last year.

Then again, some players start off looking like they’re on the HHOF fast track but then fade before the finish line. You never really know until a player’s career is over. And sometimes, we’re not even sure then.

That’s why it’s worthwhile checking in on a star player as their career is still going on. You won’t get a definitive answer, obviously, but there’s still value in a quick temperature check. We’ve been doing that for years, on this site and others. And a few years ago, we went back for another look at some veterans who’d been borderline calls before.

We’re going to do that again today, as we revisit the HHOF cases of six active players who might make for tricky calls.

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NHL weekend rankings: Spiralling Blues, lacklustre Leafs, and a mediocre East

Let's talk about hockey, because other sports make me sad. Who's up for some rankings?

But first, I wanted to touch on something Pierre brought up a few days ago when he quoted a GM: “This is the most competitive balance I’ve ever seen in our league”.

For the uninitiated, “competitive balance” is the term the league seems to prefer to “parity”, for reasons I’m not quite clear on. When they talk about it, it’s always as a good thing. I’m not so sure, and made the case almost a decade ago that there’s such a thing as too much competitive balance. But for today’s purposes, we don’t have to pick a side. You can stay neutral on the parity question and still acknowledge that… man, there is a ton of it right now.

Specifically, there’s a ton of it out east. The Western Conference features a spread of great teams, mediocre ones, and a few that are just awful. One month isn’t a long time, but it’s enough to get some separation, and we see it in one conference. Just not the other.

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