No. 201: MITCH & THE MAPLE LEAFS / One unhappy family ... well, two unhappy families.

Not the first time I've written the sensitivities of "involved hockey parents."

For the love of God, spare the child, Steve Simmons.

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FOR the Toronto Maple Leafs it’s all over but the locker-room clear-out. To this end a couple of Leafs’ entries on the How to Succeed in Sportswriting SubStack before the franchise-fail jokes fade and are filed until next season.

Since the departure of Mike Babcock and even in the wake of serial disappointments, the Leafs have been one big, happy family or so the story goes. Today’s missive focuses on pouts and petulance and the payoff draws on extended family members’ personal unhappiness with ME, offence taken over something so trivial to be remarkable. T’was not even something that showed up in a story read by tens of thousands. No, something that was read by only dozens. It would be something akin to siccing a libel lawyer on an open-mic comic.   

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ONCE again the Leafs ended up on the wrong side of the handshake line. No doubt they were disappointed, but how disappointed they are can’t be quantified. There’s no sliding scale for the relativity of heartbreak. I’m sure the data-analytics folks will come up with something at some point.

Really though the cumulative details of 80-something or 90-something games fade from memory. Only vignettes endure and really very limited vignettes at that.

For example, what do we remember of the Leafs’ 1993 run that fell one game short of the Final? The first thing was Doug Gilmour’s slippery, to and fro and to once more to beat Curtis Joseph and the St Louis Blues in double-overtime. Next would be the Wayne Gretzky’s high-stick that drew blood on Wendel Clark but not a penalty call from Kerry Fraser in L.A. And after that, well, you can measure the seriousness of fans of a certain age by their ability to reconstruct scores and events and principals. From my experience the memories of the hardcore are often better than some of the principals’. (Steve Stamkos has a total recall along the lines of Marilu Henner, but really he’s an exception that way.)

And what will we remember of the Leafs’ 2023-24 season? I suspect it’s far more likely to be drawn from the playoffs than the regular season. Already it’s hard to keep straight who Auston Matthews scored his hat tricks against. So that would leave, what? Auston Matthews’s game-winner in Game 2 in Boston?  Matthew Knies’s in OT in Game 5? William Nylander’s breakaway for what seemed like an insurance goal in Game 6? (I suspect that ten years from now not everyone will remember that it was needed insurance to win that game?)

If you’re inclined to dwell on the what might have been, then maybe it will be Joseph Woll getting hurt at 59:59.9 of that Game 6. Or that carom on the dump-in that landed on David Pasternak’s stick in OT of Game 7 (with Ilya Samsonov not reacting, with Morgan Rielly a stride late and with another Leaf freshly off the bench a stride after that).

Maybe the Leafs’ fortunes next year and the year after that will turn out differently than I expect and by differently here I intend better.  I’m not a professional pessimist or board-certified cynic. You don’t have to be either of these to believe that this team has at some point in its eight consecutive trips to the playoffs hit its peak and things will not be as good in a year’s time. Progress will give way to regress and egress. To be determined who’ll be going backward and who’ll be outbound.

They might not be able to break up that old gang of yours not mine, by reason of huge salaries of what’s called the Core Four, Matthews, Nylander, Marner and captain John Tavares and the bounds of no-movement clauses that they latter two will play under until their contracts expire in the summer of 2025.

Leafs management the last few years have brushed off calls to remake and remodel the team and expressed their unwavering, nay undying commitment to the Core Four, what the folks in the front office presented as their choice. Now management us boxed in – see the aforementioned no-movement clauses. It’s not that change is impossible—it’s just that the twists and turns will be uncomfortable and any departures unsentimental. Gentlemen, start your recriminations.

That’s why the enduring image for me from this season is not a goal or a save, not action on the ice at all. Nor was it an encounter with the media. Tiger Williams’s “done like dinner” bravado went out with wooden sticks . Ditto Don Cherry throwing a hug around Gilmour in a victorious aftermath

No, the enduring image for me came in the loss in Game 4, in what was then a melting down of the team’s fortunes and the fans’ hopes. It was also a visceral fraying of the vaunted Shanaplan, the rethinking of the franchise that dates back to Brendan Shanahan’s arrival at MLSE. In that game the Four were getting cored by the Bruins once more.

On the ice a physically wounded Auston Matthews wasn’t getting it done as the designated sniper, but on the bench he was sniping at his teammates, most pointedly at Mitch Marner. For his part, Marner was having a fit of pique that would be familiar to parents who’ve ushered kinder to atom house leagues—the hope would be that the pouting and glove-throwing like Marner’s would be petulant stuff that a pre-adolescent would grow out of by the time he or she reaches peewee. Parents who raise their kids by the book would be flipping to the start of the index and looking under “acting out, ways to prevent.”

(This is a point re Marner and parenting that I’ll return to below the paywall with a very confidential correspondence that I can trust only to subscribers and close friends … and even them I’m sheepish about it, given that I’ll be accused of betraying a confidence. I believe my throwing it out there)                                         

The cherry on top of all this was the reaction of Nylander.

He has been the member of the Core Four who over his eight seasons with the big club has received the most criticism from fans and media—most of it unfair in my mind. And he’s also been the one who has been jerked around the most by management (which made him the single one of the four who was ever object of hardball negotiations) and coaches (who made him the single one of the four to be scapegoated and benched for under-achievement). And remarkably, he was taking it in the neck for missing the first three games of the series with migraine issues—before the cause of his absence was revealed by the team he was being accused of malingering, rich considering that he has been the iron man in the Core Four missing barely a handful of his first 700 NHL games.

Really, it t goes right back to his draft year—he was the first on the scene, given that he was selected as the eighth-overall pick in 2014, signifying the franchise’s clean break from Brian Burke’s Vow of Truculence. Back then he was knocked for a mane of hair—envy—and his father’s history as a high-maintenance guy in the NHL—yeah, sins of the father over which the kid had no control.

Nylander’s response to Marner’s fit of pique was a shot not on the ice but down the bench—release the amateur lip-readers, not that there was much doubt. Thankfully, Nylander’s playoff beard was thin enough to make such translation easy at least the first part. “Stop f---- cryin’, bro.” Classic. \

Nylander’s follow-up was open to a couple of interpretations. “Just shoot” was one reading and that would have made sense in the situation, Marner treating the puck not as a beloved and faithful friend so much as a hot potato or ticking bomb in his customary playoff under-performance. The other reading of Nylander’s lips is the one I prefer—“This isn’t f---- junior.” Killer stuff.

The whole thing right here:

Absent in this infighting was Tavares—that’s not Tavares’s fault mind you. You could put it down to the Hockey Night in Canada camera crew not capturing him on the bench. Then again, that seems only fitting. The Leafs’ captaincy doesn’t seem a such a burden to Tavares the way that it was to Dion Phaneuf, but then again it’s not a great fit personality-wise, at least under the media klieg lights. Tavares is purportedly a leader of men behind the scenes per the team, but what has there been to show for that leadership? One playoff-series win and crash-and-burns of almost every description.

But back to Marner. In an earlier entry on the How to Succeed in Sportswriting SubStack I’ve written about my dealings with young Mitchell and his father. Paul Marner was ready to a Masterclass in Involved Hockey Parenting before Mitch played for the London Knights, never mind the Leafs.

My dealings with Paul Marner were more difficult than unpleasant and I second-guessed myself in the wake of how I handled his at least semi-flammable comments to me on the record. You can be the judge if you have a look at No. 92: JIM HULTON & MITCH MARNER / Sometimes you gotta swallow hard and plead mea culpa. Sometimes you regret not going bolder. I didn’t pump the tires of young Mitchell in my book Young Leafs, but I did pump the brakes with his father who spoke a little too offhand.

(You’ll need at least a trial monthly subscription to access the SubStack entry linked above. My pieces for How to Succeed in Sportswriting in the last souple of months are available to all gratis, but older entries, the first, oh, 160 or so in the archive are available only to paid subscribers. Likewise some material on this SubStack is available only to those same financial supporters and such is the case with the payoff in today’s story.)

In No. 92, I should have noted that the entry is more about Paul Marner than Mitch. And in it I didn’t mention Bonnie, semi-famously Mitch’s mom. I was remiss. My dealings with her weren’t as unsettling as the un-named arena matriarch in No. 25: NAME WITHHELD / "The Mother of All Hockey Mothers." Sample copy:  

"He wasn't drafted because of his father, right?" the woman said. "Go ahead, you can say it." 

Oh, boy. I knew not only the kid but also his father, a tough athlete in his own right but a fellow whose series of battles with booze and drugs was headed to a seventh game. As a result, he and his wife had long ago cleared marital waivers.

Bonnie’s name is probably better known to Leafs fans than Paul’s, I reckon. It goes back to Mitch’s first NHL goal and that she missed it with an epically ill-timed bathroom break.

A lot of parents and hopefully most would want to stay in the background, but here are the Marner’s looking to share the spotlight or even steal it.

Yeah, Bonnie missed her boy’s landmark goal but not a throw-away line that I typed up without much thought and the role she played in this wasn’t the charming hockey mom, but something else. The weirdest case of hockey over-parenting imaginable.