Things are anything but jolly in Toronto Maple Leafs land heading into Christmas 2025. While the Leafs have always been known as slow starters, they don’t look anything close to a playoff team as the holiday season approaches, sitting on a record of 15-15-5 that has them at the bottom of the Atlantic Division.

The Leafs have lost five of their last six games and three games in a row, with the latest coming to the Dallas Stars on Sunday night. This game was enough to get assistant coach and power play specialist Marc Savard fired, with the indication that more changes could come if the team doesn’t figure it out soon.

Perhaps the most alarming indicator that there’s a disconnect between the Leafs players and the coaching staff came following the Leafs’ loss to the Nashville Predators on Saturday night. A number of Leafs players along with Berube were asked if the struggles are stemming from mental mistakes, and the answers were all over the place. Captain Auston Matthews said he doesn’t feel that the mental game is holding them back and chalked up the struggles to making crucial mistakes despite an improved process.

“I think, mentally, we’re fine,” Matthews told reporters following the 5-3 loss to the Predators. “I mean, as shitty as it is losing, I thought the process was better. I thought we had good energy all night. Even though you’re leaving the rink upset, not coming out with any points, I just think the process we had throughout is something we can take and move forward with some of the good things that we did do and continue to channel that and continue to channel that and just be better throughout a full 60 minutes of doing those things.”

Head coach Craig Berube seemed to take the opposite approach in his postgame availability. While he agreed that the process was starting to improve, he chalked up the mistakes the team made to mental blemishes.

“Yeah, it’s mental for sure,” Berube said. “You know, we’ve got to get through it. We’ve got to get over that. We’ve got to make better decisions throughout the game.”

It wasn’t just Berube who offered this stance. Nicolas Roy and Nick Robertson both said that mentally they need to improve if they want to start stringing together some positive momentum.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s tough,” Roy told reporters after the game. “There’s definitely a shift we’ve got to do mentally where you never want to play to not lose. You want to play to win. So, you know, not sitting back, play our game, impose our game. I think we’re playing a little too much to not lose.”

Robertson echoed the ‘mental’ part of the quote in his postgame when asked about why it was such a struggle to maintain the lead.

“I don’t know,” Robertson said. “I think maybe mentally, because of how things have been going lately, maybe overthinking it, I don’t know. I think just execution, we’ve just got to be better.”

So, you’ve got your team captain saying that the team is fine mentally, your head coach saying that the team is ‘for sure’ struggling mentally, and two players who think there are mental blemishes involved but also commented on improving the process. This sounds less like two people who are at odds about why the team is going through it right now, and more like an entire dressing room that doesn’t know how to pull themselves out of this mess.

The firing of Savard on Monday seems to be a warning that if the team doesn’t work together and figure out what needs to be done better soon, somebody is going to lose their job. They have one final chance to buy some time before Christmas when they host the Pittsburgh Penguins for a matinee on Tuesday.

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