The devastation is far-reaching in Canada, from the biggest hockey market in the world to the smallest rink in the NHL.

The Toronto Maple Leafs took the Stanley Cup champions to seven games in Round 2, but they’re tracking for a 20-point drop from last season and an outright playoff miss. Auston Matthews isn’t scoring nearly as much as he used to, Craig Berube has come under fire, Mitch Marner is out, and a dependence on older, slower defenders has let the air out of what was supposed to be a contending team.

The drop off is even worse in Winnipeg, where the Jets are on pace to become the first ever Presidents’ Trophy winners to finish in last place. They’re the oldest and slowest team in the league, their forecheck can’t close down space to shut teams down, Nikolaj Ehlers is out, and three players — Mark Scheifele, Kyle Connor and Gabriel Vilardi — have scored 52 of the team’s 107 goals.

Despite the difference in markets, there are a lot of similarities between the two teams’ declines.

Why are two of Canada’s top teams from last season on pace for heartbreak in 2025-26? James Mirtle and Murat Ates teamed up to dissect the devastation.

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1. Roster changes

Toronto

Forwards in: Nicolas Roy, Easton Cowan, Matias Maccelli, Dakota Joshua

Forwards out: Mitch Marner, Max Pacioretty, Pontus Holmberg, Ryan Reaves, Alex Steeves

Defencemen in: Troy Stecher, Henry Thrun

Defencemen out: None

Goalies in: None

Goalies out: Matt Murray

Winnipeg

Forwards in: Jonathan Toews, Gustav Nyquist, Tanner Pearson, Cole Koepke

Forwards out: Nikolaj Ehlers, Mason Appleton, Rasmus Kupari, Brandon Tanev, Dominic Toninato

Winnipeg’s roster on defence and in goal is the same as it was last season.

2. A big step back from a critical player

Mirtle on the Leafs: Auston Matthews’ falloff began last year, as he played through a season-long injury that limited him to 33 goals and 78 points in 67 games. 

What few expected, however, was yet another statistical dip again this year, as he entered training camp declaring himself healthy and appeared set for a bounce back. Instead, he’s dipped to a 62-point pace, which would be a career low and a dramatic falloff from his 69-goal, 107-point campaign just two years ago. 

The reasons for Matthews’ struggles go beyond just health at this point, however, as we laid out in-depth here recently. But the Leafs are built around their captain being an MVP-calibre player and don’t have the personnel to fill the chasm if he’s unable to get back to his typical 50-goal, 90-point self. So his struggles have hurt. 

Murat on the Jets: Most people outside of Winnipeg don’t realize this, but Adam Lowry played an outsized role as the Jets’ de facto No. 2 centre for the two seasons before this one. 

Lowry’s line — previously with Nino Niederreiter and Mason Appleton — has been responsible for Winnipeg’s toughest shutdown assignments, hard-matched against the league’s Matthews-caliber players by Rick Bowness and then Scott Arniel. Its ability to outscore players like that in head-to-head competition — Lowry’s line was plus-18 over two seasons in that shutdown role — has been at least as important to Winnipeg’s success as star scorers such as Kyle Connor and Mark Scheifele.

Lowry hasn’t been able to deliver that performance as he pushes to find his game in the wake of offseason hip surgery. 

His line isn’t hemming great players in their own zone, he’s not bulldozing through opponents with his typical frequency, and his lack of agility has been exposed by faster players. He’s still defending well at five-on-five, but the biggest concern is an abject lack of offence: Lowry is on pace to score less than half of the points he averaged for three straight seasons before this one. NHL Edge data shows him getting almost nothing by way of scoring chances from the low and centre slot.

So, while everyone else is talking about the holes in Winnipeg’s second line on paper, the line that usually plays the second-most minutes on the team has gone from a dominant force that wins its minutes every year to a net-zero, devoid of secondary scoring.

3. A run of injuries to key personnel 

Mirtle on the Leafs: In addition to Matthews’ ongoing issues — which include six missed games and a potential absence on Thursday against the Jets — the Leafs have had a few key people missing a lot this season. 

Last year’s MVP on defence (MVD?) Chris Tanev has played just 11 games after suffering multiple significant injuries, including at least one that appeared to be a concussion. Netminder Anthony Stolarz, the NHL’s save percentage leader last season, has appeared in only 13 games and is out indefinitely with an undisclosed injury. 

Add in a leave of absence for Joseph Woll for more than a month to start the year and both Brandon Carlo and centre Scott Laughton fracturing a foot, and it’s been more than the depth-challenged Leafs have been able to overcome at times. 

Overall, Toronto is outside the top 10 leaguewide in salary lost to injury, but missing both goalies for long stretches, their top-two right defencemen at the same time and multiple centres has made the ailments they’ve had hurt more than those numbers show. 

Murat on the Jets: Winnipeg’s nightmare scenario came to pass for most of a month this season, with Connor Hellebuyck playing through a minor knee ailment until it required a scope. 

The four-week recovery period was the longest absence of the Hart Trophy-winning goalie’s career — he’d previously missed a single game to attend the birth of his son in 2021, among one-offs for the flu. Eric Comrie won three of 11 games in Hellebuyck’s absence while putting up some of the worst numbers in his career — an .886 save percentage that puts him on pace to give up an extra 15 goals if he finishes 2025-26 with the same number of starts as last season.

Equally concerning, Hellebuyck has been a sub-.900 goaltender while starting eight straight games since his return. 

Other problematic injuries include Lowry’s hip surgery — a decision made after multiple seasons’ worth of playing through a nagging ailment pushed it over a threshold his doctors had set for him. Lowry has played 26 of Winnipeg’s 38 games and has looked slow while doing so, outside of a great game against Edmonton earlier this week. Dylan Samberg is at his best again after breaking his wrist, but Cole Perfetti isn’t generating nearly the offence he did a season ago after missing 14 games with a high ankle sprain.

4. The loss of a star forward not everyone believed in

Mirtle on the Leafs: Let’s make one thing clear to start: Everyone believed in Mitch Marner’s ability and talent level, especially in the regular season. But after so many failed attempts in the playoffs for the Leafs’ Core Four, it was time for a change, something Marner himself instigated as he greenlit a sign-and-trade with the Vegas Golden Knights last summer. 

The Leafs have missed Marner in a handful of ways, but his absence has been most evident in just how putrid Toronto’s power play has been (27th in the NHL), how much the Leafs have struggled on their breakouts, and their lack of defensive acumen in general. Toronto remains a dangerous offensive team — eighth in goals per game — but it definitely lacks a 20-minute-a-night winger who can shut down opponents’ top lines and be a threat the other way. 

And Matthews certainly misses his pretty passes, too. 

Murat on the Jets: Ehlers’ absence looks like a driving force behind former linemates Cole Perfetti and Vladislav Namestnikov’s offensive backslides. 

The Jets used to play this line as a secondary scoring option, relying on Ehlers’ speed to create offensive zone time and his erratic, confusing — but explosive — routes in the offensive zone to create scoring chances. In the three seasons before Ehlers’ departure, he picked up the third most primary assists on the team (total) and led the Jets in five-on-five points per minute. 

He’d make confusing giveaways and flatfoot his linemates and frustrate fans who wanted more consistency, but Ehlers was a star-calibre forward who helped Winnipeg win hockey games. In his one season on the Jets’ top power-play unit, he led it in points per minute, too. The power-play regression from first in the NHL to average isn’t nearly on Ehlers’ departure alone, but it’s projected to suck 18 goals out of Winnipeg’s offence compared to last season.

5. The surprising usage of certain players

Mirtle on the Leafs: Every coach has their favourites, and Craig Berube’s haven’t been all that hard to discern in his year-and-a-half in Toronto. But an overreliance on big, slow defenders (Simon Benoit and Philippe Myers) hurt them early on. And some of the new forwards (namely Nicolas Roy and Matias Maccelli) haven’t always received as much rope as the old favourites. 

Max Domi, in particular, has been gifted a ton of opportunities, including on the top power-play unit and top line, but has been inconsistent (at best) for a second straight year. 

The arrival of waiver claimant Troy Stecher has proven a huge help in this regard, however, and Berube deserves credit for leaning on the undersized defender at the expense of some of his underperforming vets. Toronto’s improved play of late has coincided with this shift. 

Murat on the Jets: Scott Arniel was speaking in praise of Jonathan Toews this summer, glowing about Toews’ positive attitude, when he made what’s become an infamous joke.

“’Arnie, I don’t want anything given to me, I’ll start on the fourth line,’” Arniel recalled Toews saying, before adding, “I don’t think that would go over very well — a month or two on the fourth line.”

Toews has struggled badly as Winnipeg’s second-line centre to start the season. He’s Winnipeg’s worst player in terms of plus-minus, on pace for the worst offensive season of his career, and on pace to post the worst season by a second-line centre in Jets 2.0 history. He’s brilliant at faceoffs, which earns extra ice time — and a faceoff win gave Toews his first point in December earlier this week. It’s also obvious that he has a great read of the game, befitting of his legendary career.

Toews’ road has been a long one, his comeback is worthy of respect, and the disconnect between his performance and his fourth-place spot in ice time among Jets forwards is a good indicator of what’s gone wrong in Winnipeg so far this season. 

6. That one decision the coach can’t get enough of 

Mirtle on the Leafs: Where the Leafs have struggled more than anything is in getting hemmed in their own zone and giving up way too much defensively, and a lot of that comes back to Berube’s dump-and-chase style. 

It worked to an extent last season as they won a lot of ugly games, in part because they had a better roster (with a healthy Tanev and Marner still in the fold), but they still relied far too heavily on goaltending to win a lot of one-goal games. This year, the Leafs are the second-worst possession team in the league (45.5 percent) and bottom 10 in expected goals against, taking a step back even from 2024-25. 

Whether this group of players can play this style and be more effective is an open question. Berube hasn’t yet shown he’s been able to adapt his message to his personnel – as opposed to the other way around. 

Murat on the Jets: The Jets keep losing and keep doubling down on the combination of Connor and Scheifele. They’re two of the only four players who’ve produced this season — add Josh Morrissey and Gabriel Vilardi to that list — so there’s an angle from which Arniel’s decision-making makes sense. 

The one thing we still haven’t seen, despite the Jets winning four of their last 20 games and sitting in last place, is Connor and Scheifele playing apart from each other. They just might be so good that they can each drive a line. The Jets have yet to try it — no two forwards have played more together this season than Connor and Scheifele have — so we don’t know if Winnipeg is a single lineup move away from having two lines that can score instead of one.

For $15.6 million this season (and $20.5 million next season, when Connor’s $12 million extension kicks in), you’d think Winnipeg would believe in them enough to find out if they can drive two separate lines. Arniel clearly doesn’t want to break up the one thing that’s working for him, but a growing collection of losses suggests it’s not working well enough to be untouchable.

No line, duo or pairing should be untouchable on the last-place team in the league.