Where would the Leafs be if John Tavares had stayed with the Islanders?
Back in 2018, the Toronto Maple Leafs made the sort of franchise-altering move that their fans had seemingly been waiting decades for.
It’s been a little over five years since John Tavares first signed in Toronto and a little under four years since he was named Toronto’s captain.
In his time in Toronto, Tavares has performed admirably enough, putting up 155 goals and 199 assists for a total of 354 points across his 360 regular games.
His 0.98 points per game rate in Toronto is slightly above his 0.93 mark with the Islanders and exactly on par with his time in New York if you remove his first two seasons in the league. In other words, the Leafs have gotten about exactly the kind of production they could’ve reasonably expected when he signed a $77 million, seven-year deal in Toronto.
But with Tavares one of Toronto’s leaders, his legacy has also been a complicated one ever since he left the New York Islanders. Despite making the postseason every year during his tenure in Toronto, the team has five playoff series losses to go along with just one playoff series win this past season in the first round against the Lightning, where Tavares scored the series-winning overtime goal.
With Tavares’ $11 million salary, it’s easy for many fans to wonder what would’ve happened had Toronto allocated that money somewhere else.
Here are four things that could’ve happened if Tavares never left Long Island to join Toronto five years ago:
Kyle Dubas is still Leafs general manager
The moment that Kyle Dubas inked Tavares as his first major signing as Toronto’s general manager, he perhaps unknowingly sped up his own tenure in Toronto.
Hired as the second-youngest general manager in NHL history at age 32, Dubas didn’t even get to see out the duration of his biggest signing ever.
The addition of Tavares added a dynamic scoring punch to the young Leafs squad, but it also set their expectations high as a Stanley Cup contender, year in and year out.
After five years with the team, Dubas was candid in his end-of-season press conference about the stress of the job before eventually being let go later that same week. While any NHL general manager job has high expectations, it’s hard not to wonder if Toronto president Brendan Shanahan would’ve had a little bit more patience with Dubas in the long term had the team been constructed a little differently.
Nazem Kadri remains a Leaf for life
One of the most fun storylines to follow when Tavares joined the team was his reunion with centre Nazem Kadri, who had played alongside him with the London Knights as well as Canada’s World Junior team back in 2008-09.
Both players were selected in the top 10 of the 2009 NHL Draft (Tavares first, Kadri seventh), and it appeared like maybe they’d be set for a lengthy run together in Toronto.
But following Kadri’s suspension in the 2019 postseason for a hit on Boston’s Jake DeBrusk, he was eventually shipped to Colorado as part of a package for Tyson Barrie and Alex Kerfoot.
But without Tavares in the mix, even if Kadri did have a high-profile playoff incident, Toronto probably wouldn’t have been as willing to move on past one of its longest-tenured players as he would’ve likely been second on the team’s depth chart at the time.
The move worked out great for Kadri and Colorado, as they won a Stanley Cup together in 2022. But for Toronto, that trade itself remains one of the major what-ifs of the last few seasons, and it potentially never happens if Tavares wasn’t on the team’s roster.
Contract stress is non-existent
Much of the talk about Tavares’ hefty deal in Toronto isn’t exactly about his own contract; it’s about the precedent that it’s set for other members of the team. When Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner signed their contracts in 2019, they were both within the ballpark range of Tavares’ deal at $11.6 million and $10.9 million per year, respectively.
These days, there’s a lot of talk about whether the Leafs can afford to keep those three players, along with star forward William Nylander, who has one year remaining on his own deal at a cap hit of $6.96 million.
Without Tavares’ $11 million in the mix, Toronto would have much more flexibility in navigating their three-star forwards instead of four.
Leafs would still be in their playoff win drought
For all the things that Tavares’ signing may have changed, he’s still made Toronto a better team in the long run. As much as no one wants to hear Toronto complain about the toughness of their division, Tavares has dealt with playing either the Tampa Bay Lightning or Boston Bruins in 80% of the first-round series he’s played in Toronto, two teams that are among the class of the NHL over the last decade.
Even if Toronto would’ve finished a few points higher or lower in the standings, the gauntlet of the Atlantic Division remains one Toronto would’ve had to have gone through in four of the last five years, barring the 2021 pandemic-shortened season where Toronto played in the all-Canadian North Division.
Toronto’s 2021 playoff series loss to Montreal seemed inexplicable, but that series was mostly played without Tavares anyway, who suffered a major head injury in the opening minutes of Game 1. Whatever way you slice it, it’s hard to imagine the Leafs being a better team over the last five years had Tavares not joined the roster.