LOS ANGELES — Almost 25 years have passed and still Brendan Shanahan remembers how it felt to have someone in a position of authority lower the expectations for his team.

The Hartford Whalers were in a playoff race late in Shanahan’s one full season there when the general manager came in the dressing room and told the players that all wouldn’t be lost if they failed to get in. What was intended as a reassuring, pressure-releasing tactic didn’t sit well with a nine-year veteran chasing the Stanley Cup.

“I loved Jim Rutherford [as a GM], but I hated that message as a player,” Shanahan said Thursday. “I wanted to have that pressure that ‘We have to win this year.'”

That helps explain why you’ll never hear the president of the Toronto Maple Leafs dial back the “Cup or bust” expectations on his group. Even amid this up-and-down stretch drive, where they’ve both shown flashes of brilliance and lost to a 42-year-old emergency goaltender, he’s loathe to recalibrate the target.

In fact, Shanahan repeatedly pointed to areas of progress while holding a rare impromptu media scrum before Thursday’s game against the Los Angeles Kings.

“I just see adversity differently,” he said.

He’s in a position to do so because his job requires him to take a 10,000-foot view of the organization. Rather than getting caught up in the highs and lows that accompany individual wins and losses, he looks at the big picture and sees a young core that is gaining valuable experience and an operation that is functioning more smoothly with Sheldon Keefe behind the bench.

Shanahan even welcomes the ever-present swirl of emotions that can be found in the conversation around the team because it creates barriers the players have to push through.

“This is what it’s like to be a team that is trying to compete for a Stanley Cup,” he said. “It’s quieter and more peaceful when you’re going the other way and when you’re trying to rebuild from scratch. But if we are lucky enough to be the kind of team that can compete and win Stanley Cups, it will not be peaceful.

“It’ll be loud and noisy because the decisions are worth more and the small decisions, the small tweaks, will have a bigger impact on a bigger stage.

“That is just the way it is.”

One thing that stood out during his 10 minutes in front of the microphones was how open Shanahan was about the changes still to be made. He cautioned against taking a “snapshot” of the current team and drawing conclusions about their approach to building a winner — a reference, it should be noted, that didn’t seem to be aimed at the core players but rather the pieces around them.

As much as the Leafs organization is committed to using analytical data to try and find edges in decision-making, it’s clear the man at the top still values intangibles. Without prompting, Shanahan pointed to the acquisition of depth forward Kyle Clifford in last month’s trade with Los Angeles as a step in the right direction.

“I think he’s had a positive impact on [Kasperi Kapanen’s] game,” Shanahan said of Clifford. “I think having more Stanley Cup champions and more leaders and getting [Jake] Muzzin re-upped [helps]. Then just sometimes, with time, as players grow from experience and get that scar tissue.

“Obviously we’ve had some real adverse moments and real sort of highs and lows, and there are certain moments where other people [question you] or even you might even question it yourself sometimes and say: ‘How are we going to react in our next game?’

“For me it’s always, ‘What do we do in our next game?’ and there have been some occasions where those questions have been valid and they’ve been really out there and our guys have really stepped up.”

That happened Feb. 20 with a 4-0 win over Pittsburgh in response to a 5-2 loss at the hands of the Penguins two nights earlier. That happened with consecutive victories over Tampa, Florida and Vancouver last week immediately after the 6-3 loss to emergency goalie David Ayres and the Carolina Hurricanes.

Then they fell flat in a loss to San Jose on Tuesday.

No wonder GM Kyle Dubas called his team “Jekyll and Hyde” when he spoke with reporters after the trade deadline. The inconsistency has taken some of the shine off the group for outside observers, but it hasn’t left Shanahan questioning whether they can eventually reach their aspirations.

“We’re trying to develop into an elite team and we see it on some nights against certain opponents,” he said. “We know that it’s there.”

With a little more than four weeks left in the regular season, they aren’t among the top tier of Stanley Cup favourites. But even for a guy whose job it is to take the long view, you’re not going to hear Shanahan start talking about this group being built to contend in 2021 or 2022 or 2023.

They’ve been on a turbulent ride in 2019-20, but the team president believes it’s a necessary part of the process. And he’s not about to start moving the goalposts on where they hope to end up in June.

“I’ll never take that pressure off our guys, to sort of say like ‘Look, this is a long-term thing,'” said Shanahan. “It really is about now, but the truth of the matter is … this is about how we develop and how we grow.”