James Myrtle

Jonas Siegel with the athletic this year and said, you know, if it's a retool, I'm in, I want to be here.

If it's a rebuild, well, we'll see, you know, we can have that conversation.

Austin Matthews hasn't made that commitment.

You know, when, at the end of the season, he basically said, you know, I can't predict the future with what's going to happen.

He's in a similar situation to Connor McDavid, where he's got two years left on his contract.

Um,

I think at best what the Leafs organization can hope for is that he'll play next season and stay for that and then reevaluate.

But they can't be in a situation again where they lose a superstar player for almost nothing the way they did with Mitch Marner.

So there's going to have to be some real hard conversations, even if he does agree to stay and play out this next season.

I wonder if there could be a scenario where it's a Quinn Hughes-like situation where Matthews agrees to come back sort of conditionally based on how things go and the team is awful to start next year.

And that's when the conversations start about making a trade.

And if you're trading Austin Matthews, he's got a full no-movement clause.

Unlike Quinn Hughes, it's going to be difficult to get a good return back for him.

And I don't know how you're not looking at a potential rebuild then, but if ownership won't let you, then maybe you're trying to

trade Matthews for something that can help you win in the present than, again, that has kind of disaster written all over it.

So, you know, even if you take John Chayka's background and the fact that he's been out of the league for a long time, out of the equation, this is an incredibly difficult situation for anyone to turn around.

Even if you brought the best GM in the league in here to fix this, I'm not sure you could turn this around very quickly.

Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting, you know, four of the five youngest teams coming into the season are in the second round of the playoffs, which is unusual.

You know, it's, it's typically been older teams, I would say over the last eight to 10 years in the NHL that have had the most success in the playoffs.