The Expectations Have Changed for the Maple Leafs. Good!

The ancient story of David and Goliath is one of those stories that has escaped its original setting and become something bigger than itself. We use it to describe an underdog facing a seemingly unbeatable opponent. David is small, inexperienced and badly outmatched. Goliath is enormous, powerful and confident. The phrase has become a trope, a familiar way of describing situations in which the little guy takes on the giant.

Some details of the story matter to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

But the original story has a detail that sometimes gets lost in the shorthand. David doesn't defeat Goliath by becoming a smaller version of Goliath. He doesn't put on the giant's armour and try to fight the giant's fight. He takes five smooth stones from a stream, chooses his weapon and uses the skills he already has. Goliath expects a conventional battle. David refuses to give him one.

That is the part of the story that might be interesting for the Maple Leafs this season. For years, Toronto has been hockey's Goliath. Not necessarily because the team was always the best, but because of the market, the history, the money, the media attention and the enormous expectations that follow the Maple Leafs everywhere. Even when Toronto wasn't a Stanley Cup favourite, it was expected to behave like one. Every loss became evidence of failure. Every playoff exit became another chapter in the same story.

This season feels different. The Maple Leafs aren't expected to make the playoffs. They finished last in the Atlantic Division and missed the playoffs. They responded by changing the people running the hockey department and reshaping the roster around a different idea of what a team should look like.

The terms for the Maple Leafs have changed. Well, good!

Things have changed dramatically for the Maple Leafs. And, just maybe, that is the opportunity. For perhaps the first time in a long while, Toronto enters a season with something approaching the position of David. The question now is whether the Maple Leafs can resist becoming Goliath again. Can they stop worrying about proving that they are still the team everybody once expected them to be and start figuring out what this different team can become?

David chose five smooth stones. Toronto has five of its own, although these are less tangible. The first is speed, not simply skating fast but thinking faster than the opposition. The second is defence, accepting that preventing chances can be as important as creating them. The third is depth, because a team cannot survive a long season by asking its stars to solve every problem. The fourth is physicality, not fighting for the sake of fighting but making every possession and every inch of ice difficult to earn. And the fifth is belief, the willingness to play as though the absence of outside expectations is an opportunity rather than an insult.

Five ordinary stones might be enough.

None of those stones is particularly spectacular by itself. That's rather the point. The Maple Leafs don't need to overpower the NHL. They need to reshape how they play so opponents cannot simply drag them into the same old battle. David didn't need a bigger stone. He needed to use the one he had in a way Goliath didn't expect.

Five stones. One sling. One chance to hit the giant where it hurts. Maybe that is the possibility Toronto has been given this season. The giant isn't necessarily another hockey team. It is the expectation that the Maple Leafs must always be something they have repeatedly failed to become.

They don't have to defeat that expectation by becoming bigger. They might defeat it by refusing to fight on its terms.