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There will be plenty of soul-searching in Toronto during the offseason after the Maple Leafs once again failed to step up during the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The team cleared out of Scotiabank Arena on Tuesday, and a motivational message painted on a wall in the building went viral due to an oversight that was a bit hard to ignore.
At this point, it feels kind of mean to pile on the Maple Leafs after the team added the latest entry to its increasingly lengthy list of disappointing developments.
Most NHL fans are aware the franchise has not won a Stanley Cup since 1967 (the longest drought—active or otherwise—in the history of the league) and are all too familiar with the postseason struggles they’ve faced over the course of a nine-year span where they’ve made the playoffs seven times, only advanced to the second rounds twice, and saw their season come to an end by losing a Game 7 on six occasions.
Toronto may be a talented team that finished the most recent campaign at the top of the Atlantic Division on the back of a “Core Four” consisting of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, and John Tavares, but that quartet only cemented its reputation for withering in the spotlight of the Stanley Cup Playoffs after collectively notching just four goals in the seven games they played against the Panthers before being eliminated.
On Tuesday, the team faced the music during the exit meetings that were held as they cleared out their lockers at Scotiabank Arena, and TSN‘s Pierre LeBrun was one of the reporters in the building for what has become a fairly macabre end-of-season tradition in Toronto.
LeBrun snapped a photo while Maple Leafs head coach Craig Berube was conducting a press conference next to a message on the wall that reads “NO GRIT. NO GRIND. NO GREATNESS”—a sentiment that could be viewed as motivational if it featured the commas that should have been used instead of the periods that delivered a grim summation of the team that plenty of fans who noticed the grammatical oversight couldn’t ignore.
Craig Berube meeting media today. Players to follow.
Berube with some opening remarks. Talks about how much he enjoyed coaching this team. The buy-in from players was excellent, he said. Obviously nobody happy with Game 7 but he’s proud of the many good things they did this year pic.twitter.com/4IcTIfZ3iS— Pierre LeBrun (@PierreVLeBrun) May 20, 2025
They might want to update that before next season gets underway.