Leafs GM needs to get more from (or for) the Core Four — not protect them

You can’t blame new Maple Leafs general manager Brad Treliving for the scary but unavoidable fact that he’s a long way from up to speed on precisely what ails his newly inherited club.

You also can’t blame Treliving, a 53-year-old father of two daughters, both of whom dutifully showed up at his introductory press conference on Thursday, for breaking out some dad jokes in an attempt to break the tension of a decidedly awkward morning.

Less than a half-hour before Treliving was introduced as team president Brendan Shanahan’s new right-hand man, after all, the Pittsburgh Penguins made an announcement that would have put a dastardly smile on the most ruthless of pro wrestling heels. The franchise of Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby told the world it was appointing Kyle Dubas as its new president. To which Shanahan might have said, if he was being honest: Dubas doesn’t exactly rhyme with Judas, but close enough.

Of course, nobody says such things out loud in the buttoned-down, all-is-well NHL. So Shanahan, asked about the predatory timing of the Penguins’ announcement, said he was sure it wasn’t intentional (as if).

He said he wished Dubas well (if by “well” you mean “ill”). He probably also wishes Dubas had acquainted himself with the pages of a gratitude journal, since it was Shanahan who gifted Dubas the Toronto GM job only a few years before Dubas made the brazen power play for more control and more money that got him fired. But that, like everything else, was left unsaid.

In other words, this was heavy stuff. This was underworld-level, “betray your don” stuff.

It was time, clearly, for dad jokes.

At one point in Thursday’s proceedings Treliving, who’ll turn 54 this summer, tried to get a laugh by making reference to “The Dating Game,” a TV show that had its heyday when hockey players still mostly forewent helmets. He, uh, did not succeed.

Getting more relatable, he referred to his wife, Julie, as his other “boss” — albeit only after forgetting to make reference to his family at the top of his speech — and, yeah, good move. As Dubas himself would tell you, the unbearable strain hockey puts on the familial units of its multimillionaire executives can be enough to drive them away from the sport … for at least, like, a couple of weeks.

Then Treliving tried to drop a deadpan one-liner about Leafs defenceman Mark Giordano, who won a Norris Trophy in Calgary during Treliving’s time running the Flames, and the cringe-o-meter redlined.

“It’s good to see him still playing at 75,” Treliving said of Giordano.

If the joke didn’t quite land, it’s because by the end of Toronto’s playoff run, after the Leafs overplayed Giordano to the point of exhaustion on account of an otherwise threadbare defensive corps, Giordano laboured at times like he was 75, or something grimly close.

Which was only to say: Now that Treliving is Leafs GM, it’s probably time he watched some Leafs games.

But again, you can’t blame Treliving, who seems as decent and professional and polite a guy as a board of directors could dream. Still, the fact remains the new GM knows next to nothing about the Leafs except for what he’s seen and heard from afar. He hasn’t watched every moment, as a lot of the fans and media have. He hasn’t witnessed every instance of scant success and piled-up failure. He hasn’t observed the recurring themes that have emerged again and again over the years.

And so he can arrive in the centre of the hockey universe and only pretend to have a clue. He can also make plenty of mistakes. Such as his ill-advised utterance: “This can’t be about the Core Four. The success of this team, or whatever challenges we have, isn’t because of four guys or two guys or one guy. It’s about the group.”

The problem is, the whole failed experiment that’s been the last seven years has told everybody who’s actually paying attention that the exact opposite is true.

The success of this team — or rather the lack thereof in the playoffs — is about precisely four guys. It’s about four highly skilled and largely toothless forwards who take up 50 per cent of the salary cap. It’s about the inanity of continuing to build a roster so inherently unbalanced.

Even Dubas, in his final press conference as Leafs GM, seemed to be coming around to the idea that, after years of deftly swapping role players around the edges of the roster to little avail come playoff time, now might be the moment to take a knife to the meat of the thing.

And that’s the sad truth: Dubas, gone now, was deft at finding value off the NHL scrap heap. He was excellent at filling in the annual roster holes even as the salary-cap crunch loomed. There’s no evidence Treliving has the first clue how to do any of that.

Alas, maybe this is what you get when you swap out a GM who won one playoff series in five seasons for a GM who won a grand total of two in nine seasons. Upgrades, baby, upgrades.

Treliving’s boldest move in Calgary, the Matthew Tkachuk trade, was one of desperation — and it was, to be clear, a very good one, the salvaging of a potential disaster.

But now the Leafs are asking the GM who let an American star named Johnny Gaudreau leave Calgary in free agency for nothing to walk the fine line of placating an impending free agent named Auston Matthews while also encouraging Matthews to sign a deal that’s at least a little more team friendly than his last one. They’re asking Treliving to jump on a moving train, get his bearings and make informed decisions for which he can’t possibly have anywhere near the required institutional knowledge.

Between now and then, let’s hope somebody helps Treliving read the room. With patience waning here, the new general manager arrived in town and admired the beauty of the status quo.

“Just being different doesn’t necessarily make you better,” Treliving insisted, ripping the words right out of Shanahan’s mouth.

If being different doesn’t necessarily make you better, all residents of Leafs Nation can say this: Remaining the same, only more expensive, can definitely make you worse.

“My job is to protect them,” Treliving countered, speaking of the Core Four.

The idea that Toronto’s Core Four need a protector is preposterous. For the entirety of their stay in Toronto they’ve been coddled and catered to as though they were a quartet of multiple Stanley Cup winners. When mean old Mike Babcock ran afoul of them, Babcock was fired. When Sheldon Keefe spoke the slightest word against them last season, he was made to backtrack like a stooge.

So, no. Treliving’s job, if he’s actually doing it, shouldn’t be to protect them. His job should be to maximize them, through trade or torment, carrot or stick. The thing that attracted him to the job — “It’s the Leafs” — either resonates with the Core Four or it doesn’t. Having just been hired by a president who’s so attached to the quartet, mind you, you can’t blame Treliving for paying homage to his newly inherited collection of talent.

“There’s a lot of pain to get good players,” Treliving pointed out.

That’s as true as most dad jokes are brutal. But soon enough it’s going to occur to Treliving that the pain grows exponentially when you’re the guy who can’t figure out how to get those allegedly good players to actually win. As Treliving said himself: “The clock is ticking.” And time, sadly, is not on the new guy’s side.

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk