The Toronto Maple Leafs held their end-of-year press conference on Tuesday, kicking things off with head coach Craig Berube. He opened his session voicing his support for the team and commending the progress they made in his first year behind the bench.

For as sour as the manner in which they lost Game 7 in and the short playoff run left the team and the fanbase, there was undoubtedly progress made under Berube in his first season as head coach. The team won the Atlantic Division for the first time in the Core Four era, and although it wasn’t by much, they had a longer playoff run than they did under Sheldon Keefe or Mike Babcock. Still, nobody is happy with the end result of the season, or more specifically, the way it ended.

There are few worse ways to lose Game 7 than by getting dominated on home ice, and Berube insists that the Leafs lost because they abandoned the structure that got them there in the first place.

“The last couple of days, there’s a lot of things that go through your mind for these big games,” Berube said. “You may not have your A-game in these games, but what you have to rely on is your structure. When I look at these games and I look at the situations that hurt us, we lost our structure. Structure is very important, and if you don’t lose your structure, you can get through without your A game.”

The structure he’s referring to helped them win games by snatching momentum back after it was taken away. It helped them learn to defend in tight games and play with tight structure, and with a record to start the season of 27-0 when leading after two periods, it’s clear that the system worked for them from a defensive standpoint. When you step out of that and start making mistakes in the areas of your game that are typically air-tight, it hurts you in a playoff setting, where the margin for error is so small.

“Like I said, I thought we looked really good, we were ready,” Berube continued. “Sometimes you think you’re ready and you prepare to be ready, and you kind of don’t have it. You’re not on your toes enough, and that’s what I talked about structure. Structure will take care of that. You guys might not understand what I’m talking about, but playing with your structure and staying with it. I thought in Game 7 we lost our structure.”

It probably isn’t what Leafs fans want to hear after another season without even a Conference Final appearance in the current era, but Berube still has good things to say about his team. And if the Leafs ever want to do the thing and make a good run, they won’t be doing themselves any favour by showering themselves with negative vibes heading into next season.

“I really like this team. I think this is a very good team,” Berube said when asked if there was anything he could take from the Cup-winning St. Louis Blues to apply here. “To get over that hump, we have to learn from this Game 7 here, going forward, and we’ll learn from it and we’ll be better. They’re different teams, they were constructed differently from this team, but they’re both capable of winning. We just have to learn to do things a little bit differently in new games and new moments.

The dark cloud overtop of the Leafs following another elimination is the status of Mitch Marner. His contract is up, and the Leafs will need to make a tough decision regarding Marner and how he’ll factor into the Leafs’ plans going forward, but as long as he’s on the roster, his head coach has his back.

The Leafs will have a month to continue their conversations with Marner, while the current belief is that he’ll test free agency. With or without Marner, Berube is focused on improving in 2024-25 and has belief in what he saw this season.

“We accomplished a lot this year. There’s always things throughout a season that maybe you could have done, or handled differently, but like I said. We won our division, 108 points, lot of good things, changed our style of play and how we did things.”