In watching the NHL trade deadline come and go without making needle-moving changes to the Maple Leafs, Brad Treliving sent a clear message to the long-time core of Toronto’s roster.

There are no playoff-hardened difference makers walking through the door. Treliving arrived in Toronto insisting “this can’t be about the Core Four,” but who’s kidding who? On the matter of whether the Leafs succeed or fail in the coming post-season, it will very much be about the Core Four.

“At the end of the day, a lot of the answers are going to come from the guys who are in the room,” the general manager said Friday. “That’s the reality of the situation. We’ve got a group that’s driven. We’ve got a group that’s hungry.”

The Leafs also have a group that, for the most part, Treliving isn’t responsible for assembling. After a deadline in which he declined to part with either a first-round pick or top organizational prospects such as Fraser Minten and Easton Cowan, the GM’s lack of faith in the crunch-time reliability of a team largely built by Kyle Dubas was never more outwardly apparent than it was Friday.

On a day Treliving acquired fourth-line forward Connor Dewar to complete an underwhelming pre-deadline period that also saw the acquisition of depth defencemen Ilya Lyubushkin and Joel Edmundson, the GM declined to even entertain the prospect that the Leafs are on a likely collision course with a first-round playoff matchup with the Boston Bruins.

“We’ve got to get into the playoffs. We’ve got to get in. That’s our main focus here right now, is qualifying,” Treliving said, bizarrely. “We’ve got some work to do yet. And we’ve still got some 20 games to go to get into the playoffs, and that’s goal number one.”

Fair enough, I guess. As of Friday, no NHL team was guaranteed to be in the playoffs — at least not technically, mathematically, officially. But let’s not be stupid here. Barring unspeakable calamity, the Leafs are going to make the playoffs. Hockey-Reference.com had their post-season probability as a 99 per cent lock Friday. Moneypuck.com had it at 99.2 per cent. That Treliving was somehow expressing concern the Leafs could still blow it says something about his belief in what his predecessor assembled.

Why would Treliving use his future draft and prospect capital to slap yet more deadline duct tape on Dubas’s fundamental mistakes? Why would Treliving take undue risk to vindicate Dubas’s ill-advised vision?