Dave Nonis forgot one last Christmas present under the tree for Leafs fans, and delivered it on Tuesday, firing head coach Randy Carlyle.

The move comes half a season and one contract extension too late, but the news of Carlyle's dismissal is positive nonetheless.

The Boston Red Sox ended an 86-year World Series drought after hiring a 28-year-old executive named Theo Epstein, and after the Maple Leafs hired 28-year-old Kyle Dubas as assistant GM on Tuesday there is hope a similar miracle might work in Toronto.

We're at that point in the season, ladies and gentlemen: The inevitable Toronto Maple Leafs Death Spiral. This event is so common that there are telltale signs that every Leafs fan knows. If you're wondering whether your team is in a Death Spiral, consult the handy chart below.

On the one-year anniversary of his hiring as Toronto Maple Leafs general manager, Dave Nonis is witnessing his team implode. Toronto has only two regulation wins in their last 23 games and only four in the 30 games since a 10-4 October.

After making the playoffs last season the Leafs have taken a gigantic step backwards in 2013-14, although they are miraculously still in a playoff spot thanks to a terrible Eastern Conference.

Now seems like a good time to evaluate Nonis' first year on the job.

The tide might be turning against Randy Carlyle.

After a quick start to the season has been erased by an awful November and the first few weeks of Deathcember, the shine on Carlyle, the coach responsible for ending Toronto's near decade-long playoff drought, is starting to fade. Last year many of his moves were roundly criticised by the blogosphere and some of the saner elements of the mainstream media (shout out to James Mirtle!), but the Leafs were winning, so for the broader portion of newspaper writers and television analysts Carlyle could do no wrong.

The same reverence for Carlyle no longer exists. Many of his puzzling moves are being questioned by pundits who might have looked the other way last year. Winning cleans up a lot of mistakes, even those made by coaches.

It is a dark time for the Maple Leafs. Although the playoffs drought has been destroyed, the opposition has driven the Toronto forces from their lofty Eastern Conference perch and hammered them across the conference. Evading the dreaded regression monster, a group of heroes led by James Reimer and Jonathan Bernier have established hope on the ice. The evil lord Carlyle, obsessed with allowing the most shots ever, has dispatched thousands of forwards onto the far reaches of the bench to allow more ice time for Tyler Bozak....

Training camps are open and that means hockey is back. Huzzah, we are safe to watch Sportscentre highlights again!

It also means there is plenty to write about, unless you're super lazy, in which case you can dust off your notebook and pick from one of the tried and true cliché storylines that comes up every training camp. Just add in different names from this year's roster like a Mad Libs story and you're set.

Stick tap to this Bill Simmons article for the inspiration.

Nikolai Kulemin's name has popped up in trade rumours this year, with most of the rumour mongers citing his drop in production as the primary reason. He's now become a "change of scenery" candidate and one the Leafs should allegedly be happy to trade.

After scoring 30 goals in 2010-11, Kulemin has scored 11 goals over his next 102 games. That's not even 9 over 82 games. When a player drops that far, it's hard not to wonder what's gone wrong. How can a player go from a career high to a career low so quickly?

Well, Kulemin's 30-goal year was the outlier, one likely to never be repeated. When you combine his career-high 30-goal season and his career-low 7-goal season that followed, it averages out to 18, right in line with 15-16 goals Kulemin scored his first two seasons. He wasn't as good as he was in 2010-11 and he wasn't as bad as he was in 2011-12.

But Kulemin only has four goals this season, which would total 10 over a full 82-game season. So compared to his early career, not even his outlier season, he has been conspicuously missing from the score sheet.

But Kulemin's lack of output is primarily a perceptual issue. Relative to his role, Kulemin is actually producing at a high level.

There's a case to be made that Randy Carlyle is a rogue agent sent to infiltrate the Maple Leafs and take them down from the inside.

Carlyle has made a number of curious decisions that are putting the Leafs in a position to lose. The Leafs have to overcome many of Carlyle's decisions on a nightly basis in order to win.

An ugly 5-2 drubbing at the hands of a Stanley Cup contender, on the heels of a painful 7-4 loss to the Islanders, and Leafs Nation is out for blood.

Captain Dion Phaneuf is taking the brunt of the criticism after posting a minus-7 over the two games. The Fan 590 didn't take long to incite a reaction from steaming fans, asking whether the captain was a buy-out candidate.

We're taking your #MapleLeafs calls right now on #SN590! Do you think Phaneuf is a buy-out target? Call 416-870-0590, 1-888-666-0590 or *590
— SN 590 The FAN (@FAN590) January 27, 2013

The question doesn't deserve even a moment's thought. Phaneuf is by far the Leafs' best defenceman despite what his plus/minus rating says.

One of Randy Carlyle's major challenges as the Leafs' head coach will be implementing a defensive scheme that somehow cuts down on the massive goals-against totals that have doomed the Leafs for years.

He can start by actually teaching the team about defence, something former coach Ron Wilson felt was unnecessary, apparently. In fact, Wilson didn't teach the Leafs anything about the defensive zone when he was in Toronto, not even where in the rink it was located. Poor Cody Franson was so confused he thought it was in the press box.

To combat the utter ignorance on his roster, Carlyle drew up a map of the defensive zone to help teach the Leafs how to play defence. It wasn't supposed to be leaked to the public, but I found a crumpled up copy in a trash bin after Leafs practice on Thursday. Perhaps it was tossed aside by a certain bald-headed, injury-prone centre on his way down to the minors.

Special thanks to Down Goes Brown for the inspiration for the piece and my friend, Geoff, for his input.

Four years ago the Leafs rushed an 18-year-old Luke Schenn to the NHL, and it looks like the team is prepared to do the same with Morgan Rielly.

“I’m gonna pick the best players,” Randy Carlyle told the Toronto Star. “If (Rielly) is among the best, I’ll have no qualms picking him because he’s 18.”

Management has echoed the coach's philosophy.

“If Morgan Rielly can help our team win, I really don’t care that he’s only 18,” Dave Nonis told the National Post. "If he’s ready, he’ll stick around."

The hope would be that Rielly could help upgrade the Leafs' blueline, one which has been near the bottom of the league for years. He is a slick-skating, puck-moving defenceman that could potentially step in and provide a reasonable facsimile of Jake Gardiner, who is currently out with a concussion.

The Leafs can give Rielly a five-game try-out (a sixth game automatically burns a year on his contract), but allowing him to make the Leafs this season, regardless of how NHL-ready he may appear, would be a monumental failure.

The fans wanted it, and the fans got it. Chants of 'FIRE WILSON' rang loudly earlier in the week against the Panthers, the only life in the ACC after two quick goals against sucked any sort of interest right out of the crowd.

Brian Burke has finally fired Ron Wilson, although the inevitable might be too late for the Leafs to still make the playoffs. The team is only five points out, and the Eastern Conference is truly horrible, but the Leafs need to go on quite a run to end the season to make it happen.

The man brought in to lead the charge is a man known quite well to Burke, Randy Carlyle, the former Anaheim Ducks coach who was fired earlier in the year after a pitiful start to the season.