It’s a new season and the Maple Leafs have their fans fooled once again

Let’s cast our minds back to the most recent nadir in Toronto Maple Leafs history – this past May.

That’s when they introduced their new GM, a guy who’d been run out of his one and only big league job and hadn’t had a sniff of the quality since. Those Leafs finished last in the Atlantic. They had the worst defence in the Eastern Conference. They’d experienced the playoffs as a distant flash of light on the horizon that flared up briefly in late February and then faded to black.

Their biggest star got hurt, went incommunicado and made it muddily clear he was questioning all of his professional choices. After promising not to fire everyone, the Leafs fired everyone, and then had enormous trouble replacing them. Those Leafs were something worse than bad. They were comic.

So what’s changed since then? Nothing important.

But it is the magic of the Leafs that any sort of change can be sold – and bought! – as transformative. Toronto could hire a new chef and convince season ticket holders that all previous disappointments were down to protein deficiency. Snowing their customers is the only thing this organization does at a world-class level.

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Welcome to the 2026-27 Toronto Maple Leafs season. I don’t want to promise anything, but you might want to start picking out a place to put your lawn chair on Bay St. If the Leafs could figure out a way to sell spots on public thoroughfares, believe me, they’d already be doing it.

Change is not the same as difference. A great deal about the Leafs of September as opposed to the Leafs of May is different, but all of it is on the periphery of the coming season.

The Leafs won the consensus No. 1 pick in the draft, Gavin McKenna. In limited exposure thus far, he looks tricksy and fun. Maybe not quite as tricksy as another can’t-miss No. 1 pick, Connor Bedard. So far, in three good seasons, Bedard has driven Chicago absolutely nowhere close to the playoffs.

The popular notion that another skinny 18-year-old is going to be an immediate all-star for Toronto is the reason why no one wants to play here.

They managed to lure a defenceman in free agency, Darren Raddysh. If Raddysh plays like he did last year in Tampa, that’s a win for the Leafs. If he plays like he did every year before that, the only people winning this deal are the Canada Revenue Agency. But at least the Leafs now have one quality blue-liner who wouldn’t have to head straight to the ER after getting out of a bean bag chair. Where they find five others remains mysterious.

There is the new goalie, Sergei Bobrovsky. Bobrovsky isn’t old enough to be your father. He only looks that way when he moves side to side.

The elevator pitch for giving Bobrovsky, 114, a three-year deal is “two-time Vezina and Stanley Cup winner.” By that logic, why didn’t anyone in scouting give Terry Sawchuk a look? Yes, obviously, Sawchuk is not quite alive, but his CV sparkles.

Late in the day, they added Columbus winger Kirill Marchenko via trade. That’s a plus. Losing Matthew Knies in order to get him is a minus. Statistically, the two players are nearly identical. The only real difference is that Marchenko is three years older. For now, let’s call that a wash.

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Then there’s the new coach, whose name I’ve forgotten again. I know I have it somewhere in here … Jim Hiller.

At the very least, hiring John Chayka to run the club was a wild swing. Hiring Hiller is a bunt.

It’s the sort of move you make when your team either runs on rails or has no hope. The Leafs aren’t the first sort of club, so are they saying they’re the second?

And that’s it. That’s what’s changed.

There are a whole bunch of other guys on the edges, which has long been the most reliable trick in the Leafs’ off-season group-sales attack plan. You hit supporters with a blizzard of nameplate swaps.

Let them go Kabbalah on the combinations, convincing themselves that a guy who wasn’t wanted anywhere else is the key to the puzzle here. No fanbase is better at QAnon’ing itself into a championship frenzy than Toronto’s.

In the end, the most brilliant move was shifting the unpopular core of the team out of the spotlight. Not a lot, but enough. Let McKenna absorb the media hits. Don’t worry. The Leafs will never come to regret that choice.

That gives you a chance to reintroduce Auston Matthews as someone who isn’t counting the days until his good-behaviour release from Canada. It lets William Nylander practise his newest move – smirking less. You can recast John Tavares as McKenna’s dad. And it lets Morgan Rielly do more PR than hockey, which is his real strength.

Nothing is fundamentally different. Winning games still depends on the guys who couldn’t do that last year. The Leafs are putting on the same show in front of a different locker-room audience. But, hey, like they always say at meetings of the Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment board, what do I know?

It’s possible that slapping some aluminum siding onto a losing hockey team is the latest thing in franchise building. It’s conceivable that what was missing all along wasn’t two quality defensive pairs and the kind of chemistry that isn’t always exploding. Maybe the secret was hiring a linemate for Matthews whose company he enjoys, and hoping that guy can prevent him from going dark in mid-winter.

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Maybe everybody beyond the wall that separates Leafs country with the real world is wrong. Maybe the Leafs only seem to be stuck in mid-table quicksand – too bad to succeed, but too good to fail in a way that sparks real change. Maybe Matthews isn’t already over the hill, maybe Raddysh is Larry Robinson and maybe McKenna is Wayne Gretzky minus the baseball cap.

A lot of maybes. Only one thing seems certain – Toronto is back on side with the Leafs. Why? Because why not? Like all bad gamblers, this city will never stop believing its luck is just about to change.