He has to be the odd man out at this point.

I doubt that Marner gets moved even if TOR management explores the market unless he wants out. They probably won't get the type of return that they are looking for even if Marner was willing to waive. If there's going to be a change in the core this off-season, I would suspect it would be because Matthews wants out. He would return a king's ransom probably but the Leafs would likely be worse off, the only thing is that it saves them from potentially losing him down the road for nothing.

They should just stay the coarse, they had a suspect d-core and still managed to play in multiple close games. The biggest thing for them is to try to retain whoever they can of the forward group, improve the defense, and find a way to improve the powerplay.

Honestly, you guys put up a fight, forced game 7, took guts to turn it around like that, but yeah someones got to move. sucks the way you guys lose, feel sorry for ya

As an outsider, the Leafs best games of the series were 5, 6 and 7. Coincidently Mathews missed games 5 and 6 and had limited ice time in game 7. I am not saying Mathews personally is the problem, just the mentality of the team changes when he isn’t on the ice, they play a more blue collar, everyone buys in to defense type of game when they know they don’t have anyone to take over the game himself. They need to figure out how to play that way even with Mathews in the lineup, that is what will get them a deeper run.

He has a NMC. They're keeping him to run it back again

Until TML get 2 better Dmen than Reilly, they will never accomplish anything.

He's a 2nd pairing guy on an awfull contract and has at least been directly at fault for Toronto's last 3 game 7 losts against Boston.

The team had a momentarily revelation in the last 3 games that thight defense wins playoffs games, but that system can't be sustainable with an unreliable no1 Dman.

Marner is not going anywhere. He has a NMC and has a contract is buyout proof. Unless he wants out, Toronto is screwed. Next season they will have to run it back and have no way to recoup value. Sure they will have cap space in the summer of 25 but they don’t have the young depth needed to maintain their contention window.

The Leafs don't have a lot of prospects but they have enough young forwards (Knies, Cowan, Robertson and Minten) and goalies (Woll and Hidelby) to maintain their window potentially considering that Matthews, Marner and Nylander will be 27-28 next year. Their problem though is they got nothing on defense pretty much, aging dcore on the NHL level and not much in terms of prospects, so they are going to need to get lucky in this draft or sign some FAs but they don't got too much cap to even do that.

Next year will be even tougher for them to put together a team, but once Tavares contract is up, they will have an opportunity to do something, it might just be too late though since Matthews may want out/they would only have two more years with him guaranteed.

Yea I wouldn't look that far into this. The rumours/estimates were that Matthews got hurt/had his injury flare up in game 3. Prior to that he had his best playoff performance of his career and carried the team to a win. Yes, the team played their best hockey when he was out, but I think that was probably more indicative of the fact they had their backs against the wall more than not having Matthews. Marner on the other hand is completely different story as he struggled in every single game of this series.

The most important thing here is that defense cost money on the open market and takes time to develop via prospects. I do think Toronto was the better team compared to Boston but they were never going to beat either Florida or NYR/Car.

Yeah, there's no quick fix for this team, they need to get lucky in this draft and select a D-man that ends up contributing sooner rather than later, and they do need to sign a top 4D, they don't have a whole lot of money to do so but maybe they could get a defensive guy, question though is what UFA defender wants to sign in Toronto? Probably none.

If the Leafs won and also got through FLR, I do think they could have beaten CAR if they ended up facing them in RD3. Atlantic teams typically don't end up making it to the Conference Finals by accident, so it would mean that they are playing good hockey, and they typically do have success against CAR in the regular season/CAR hasn't been great in the 3rd round. We'll never know though.