No. 282: NOT SO YOUNG LEAFS / For once-again crestfallen fans, memories of that single time Auston, Mitch & Willy over-achieved.
I embedded with the Leafs in the rookie years for Matthews, Marner & Nylander, when the rebuilding team wasn't expected to make the playoffs. Who'd have guessed that would be as good as it'd ever get?
BACK in November 2016, I was minding my own business, writing features and covering the occasional game or event for Sportsnet, when an editor gave me a call. His publishing house had recruited a writer and commissioned a book on the rebuilding of the Toronto Maple Leafs, an enterprise anchored around their first overall pick in the draft the previous June, Auston Matthews, with other rookies in supporting roles, among them Mitch Marner and William Nylander. The original writer, who had a day job to balance, had followed the team through training camp and the first month of the regular season before realizing that the book was something more onerous and time-consuming than first imagined—yes, this writer became the first person to give up on this version of the Matthews-Marner-Nylander Leafs.
The editor asked if I’d be willing to jump in and take over—not that I’d be working with a partial manuscript nor entering a co-authorship deal. Could I turn around an 80,000-word manuscript with a deadline of five seconds after the season ends? Like you had to ask. If you’re paying, I’ll make it work.
From the publisher’s website: “An in-depth and behind-the-scenes look at how Auston Matthews and a gang of talented young hockey players are breaking from Toronto’s troubled sporting past and rekindling the city’s love for its team.” Sigh.
I don’t disown Young Leafs. It wasn’t my idea, wasn’t my title, certainly wasn’t my jacket copy.1 And I, like most of you here, haven’t read it—okay, I proofread it, but really the book was such a mad rush to publish, it was more speed-reading than anything else. Actually picking up a physical copy and cracking it open to savour turn of phrase and detail, no. Fact is, like a lot of books I wrote, I don’t own a copy of Young Leafs—I have copies of first drafts stuffed for safe-keeping in clouds, but that’s about it.
I thought about Young Leafs because the aforementioned principal actors in this human drama (tragicomedy?) just wrapped their ninth season together—what looks like their last season together, though many said the same thing last year and the year before that, if not farther back.
With the Leafs’ crashing in Game 7 on Sunday, I thought it might be time to revisit that first go-round with this group. Yeah, eight years after the fact, I’ll get around to reading, re-reading or at least reconsidering Young Leafs now that they’re not so young. Hopefully the Kingston library has kept a copy in the humour section.
(Though Amazon.ca reviews averaged a generous 4.2, a product of Bezos’s effective delivery system and nothing to do with my finished product, but one armchair critic slayed me with a comment from 2019 when the gloss had started to go off the Shanahan masterplan: “Set in some sort of alternate reality where the Leafs aren't consistently one of most underachieving, disappointing teams in professional sports history, this delightful non-fiction piece sets for a world where the Leafs have all these amazing young players and don't somehow trap themselves into a cap nightmare by overpaying all of them and then having to trade talent to get some plug named Cody Ceci.”)
First thing to remember: While Young Leafs focused on Auston, Mitch and Willie, the team’s first-rounders in consecutive drafts, they weren’t the only rookies on the Leafs that season. I gave a fair bit of time and ink to other rookies who skated with the team in 2016-17.
If I were to ask you who was the fourth highest-scoring rookie on the Leafs, I’d bank on you missing it and not only because two first-year players tied with 36 points: Connor Brown and Nikita Zaitsev. Brown, yeah, maybe some people would have guessed, but Zaitsev was a shock, a Russian who went undrafted and bloomed late in the KHL. Zaitsev had a great first run around the league, but he suffered a concussion late in his rookie season and his game never recovered—that’s forgotten now and if he’s remembered at all it’s for a brutal contract, arguably Lou Lamoriello’s worst in his run in Toronto.
With the quiz about the Leafs’ fourth-leading rookie scorer that season, I suspect that most fans would guess Zach Hyman, who skated with Matthews for most of the season and did a lot of the heavy lifting. Also in the mix, albeit in a bit role, was Kasperi Kapanen, who was a son of a NHLer like William Nylander, albeit Sami Kapanen was more popular with his teammates and coaches than Michael Nylander back in the day. Finally, in a purely cameo role, there was also goaltender Antoine Bibeau, who played his first two NHL games with the Leafs that season, what would turn out to be half his NHL career total.
As I have laid out on occasions here, I’m not a fan of a team for professional reasons, adhering to the ancient and seemingly passe conventions of press-box decorum, but I do allow myself to be a fan of a player, mostly to do well. And inevitably those I pull for those who aren’t the most gifted, but get by and get over on a combination of will and wiles. For that reason, it’s no surprise that my favourite Young Leafs of 2017 are Not So Young Former Leafs, Hyman and Brown, role players, supporting cast members to the star talents.
Both were hometown types with neat backstories: Hyman wrote books for kids and his father, a developer, bought up seemingly half the teams in the GTHL. Hyman was drafted by Florida but did a full run in the NCAA and as a free agent opted to sign with the Leafs. Brown was still living at home for a time, his father being a longtime coach in the GTHL with the Toronto Marlies. Brown had been a late-round draft pick of the Leafs and lightly considered as a prospect, but I remember being impressed when I talked to him a couple of years before in Erie when he was an older teammate of Connor McDavid on a brutal Otters team. Sherry Bassin, running the show with Erie back when, would have adopted Brown if he ever hit the market.
Alas, as much as I would have enjoyed focusing on these two, it wasn’t what the publisher had in mind. Gotta give the readers what they want. Would the Leafs have turned out to be a better team if they had managed to hold on to Hyman and Brown, prioritizing chemistry and mix, rather than pushing their chips in on flashy skill? There are too many do-overs to consider, so I won’t waste time with them here.
IN his exit interviews, Mitch Marner was very much sounding like he’s looking at the Leafs in his rearview mirror—his selection of past tense was about as telling as it could gets. With regard to my fraught dealings with Mitch’s mère et père, check out these two previous entries.
and
No. 201: MITCH & THE MAPLE LEAFS / One unhappy family ... well, two unhappy families.
Likewise, we don’t even know if we’re getting an exit interview with Brendan Shanahan—the team prez’s fate is in the hands of Keith Pellet and the board. Hard to see him back, but it’s the Leafs. If Shanahan is in fact done and goes away quietly, here’s my previous entry on Brendan from his own rosier times.
You’ll need at least a trial paid subscription to access these. Nos. 201 & 202 were, yes, timed with the Leafs’ exit last season. If Mitch signs as a free agent elsewhere and I don’t have occasion to write about him again, it will suit me fine, (BTW, on a far lighter note, I bumped into Jim Hulton at a Kingston Sports Hall of Fame dinner a couple of weeks back and will do a piece about him down the line.)
LEAFS fans are crestfallen once again this spring—I’m trying to coach my younger daughter through her franchise-driven strain of seasonal affective disorder, but with little effect, whether managing her ungrounded euphoria …
or her inevitable despair …
As a bit of theatrical fandom, Steve Dangle might entertain his core audience which I imagine includes a lot of Habs/Bruins/Sens/Oilers et al fans who come for the schadenfreude, but when you’ve seen one paroxysm you’ve seen them all. This video constitutes a greatest-hits/fails package which should render any further viewings unnecessary.
So I thought it might lighten things up by walking into the Wayback Machine and setting it for the April of 2017, the last time the team over-achieved, when the Young Leafs were Fun Leafs. Worth remembering: That rookie-laden team was a longshot to make the playoffs at the start of the season. From hockeyreference.com pre-season odds for 2016-17—suffice it to say that smart money didn’t think much of the rebuild.
Yeah, the Leafs entered the 2016-17 season with the longest odds in the league and edged out the nearing-the-cusp-of-Cups Tampa Bay Lightning for the last playoff berth in the Eastern Conference. The Leafs even took a series lead against the Capitals in that first round and Ovie & Friends were just a season away their own Cup.
Lots of blasts from the past in these passages—get ready for the wit and wisdom of coach Babcock. Don’t know that anyone had Tyler Bozak getting a ring on their bingo card, but there he was hoisting the Cup in Boston with the Blues. Ditto a ring for Nazim Kadri, who was huge for that 2016-17 Leafs team—maybe my favourite moment that season was the number he did on Connor McDavid in a Toronto win in OT. Ditto Zach Hyman becoming one of the league’s leading power forwards and a 54-goal scorer. Both Zach Hyman and Connor Brown got as close as you can get to a Cup without winning it last season and they’ve still got another life with the Oilers this spring.
Without further ado, Games 80 and 81 from April 2017, much better times to be a Leafs fan, when all this darkness and recriminations were unimaginable. And if you think that this team could never be likeable, watch either of these videos. The first video, the highlights from Game 81, are easily digestible, but the second takes me back—I was sitting there on Saturday night, presuming that, if the Leafs lose, my book was going to have to be delivered in 36 hours and if they win, not a just a reprieve of a couple of weeks but also a sweetener, a far better story.
From YOUNG LEAFS
raw copy, apologies for typos
MIKE Babcock would claim that, back in the fall, he had told his team that if they were going to make the playoffs—with a big emphasis on if—it was going to come down to Game 82. And if—with an equally big emphasis on if—it was going to be a “crawl” into the last available playoff spot on the Eastern Conference grid. He was re-enforcing what veteran players know, what certainly the handful of players who had been around for Game 7 in Boston knew: At least a couple of imperfect teams make into the Stanley Cup playoffs. Sometimes very imperfect. Sixteen teams make it into the post-season, but at least a couple leave you scratching your head. It might have seemed hopelessly optimistic to give that why-not-us message to a team that finished last overall the season before.
As it turned out, it hadn’t come down to Game 82. It had come down to Game 80, a win-and-you’re-in tilt at the ACC against Toronto’s nearest pursuer, Tampa Bay, a team that the Leafs had rolled over 5-0 in Florida just a few weeks before. The Lightning had been absolutely gutted by injury all season long. “If we had [Tampa’s] injuries, we wouldn’t have a sniff at the playoffs,” Babcock said. Tampa Bay general manager Steve Yzerman had thought so little of his team’s chances that he was a seller at the deadline, dealing former All-Star Ben Bishop to L.A. and his key depth player, Brian Boyle, to the Leafs. And yet, coming into Toronto for Game 80 without Steven Stamkos, the Lightning had gone 6-0-1 in its last seven games and were still within sight of the playoffs. With the harsh mathematics of elimination constantly stacked against them, Tampa Bay had been playing with Game 7 urgency for weeks.
A less-than-hopelessly optimistic Leafs fan had to have presumed that Tampa Bay’s adrenaline would eventually ebb. An less-than-hopelessly optimistic Leafs fan had to have presumed that the flat effort against Washington a couple of nights before was simply a by-product of fatigue in the second of back-to-back games. A return to recent form seemed a fair shot. Including the loss to the Capitals, the Leafs had gone 7-2 in their last nine games. All the websites calculating the Leafs’ odds of making the playoffs had them in the mid-90s going into the Tampa Bay game. Talk about Toronto landing a second-seed in the Atlantic Division and home-ice advantage in the opening-round series didn’t seem far-fetched. Casting further forward, a prospective match-up with the seemingly staggering and beat-up Ottawa Senators seemed to give more than a glimmer of hope for the Leafs to advance to the second round.
Matthews had fully snapped out of his seven-game goalless drought that ran through early March—he had eight goals in the ten games running up to the potential playoff clincher against the Lightning, and his 31 even-strength goals led the league in that department. But as good as Matthews had been, as still flashy as Marner continued to be, it was in fact Nylander who had been the Leafs best rookie in the home stretch, maybe even their best player through that time, with the possible exception of Andersen. The Leafs’ line-shuffling up front had come to an end, and Nylander was thriving in his role on Matthews’s left wing. The league noticed Nylander’s four goals and ten assists in 14 games in March and named him the league’s Rookie of the Month for the second time in the season.
Despite the upward trends in the Leafs’ favour, the team came out with its flattest effort since its loss to the Panthers in Fort Lauderdale. Brayden Point, another Tampa Bay rookie who had been thrust into a lead role in Stamkos’s absence, scored twice in Tampa Bay’s 4-1 win. The visiting team had directed the play from Nikita Kucherov’s goal midway through the second period right through to the end of the game.
“We didn't play like we normally do," Mike Babcock said. "I thought we were slow; I don't know if we were tight but we weren't in sync. They won all the battles and all the races and we never established the game we normally play." The coach admitted that he thought his team came down with a bad case of nerves. “We can’t let the energy and excitement of the moment get in the way of who we are,” he said, though he had no suggestions how to head this off going into the last weekend of the season.
As worrisome as the flat-line effort over sixty minutes was a single moment late in the first period that set the tone for the game. Matthews was gathering speed in the neutral zone and hitting the blueline without the puck when defenceman Jake Dotchin lined him up. Dotchin had been on the other end of a flagrantly illegal play just a couple of nights before: a spear from Boston’s Brad Marchand. Some would skate away from an assault like that and aspire to play a fair and clean game, but Dotchin didn’t draw that as the lesson. He seemed to take it as instructive and representative of the raised stakes in a desperate run to the playoffs—something along the lines of do-unto-others-before-they-can-do-unto-you. Dotchin stuck his right knee out in Matthews’s path and the Leafs rookie’s own left knee buckled. Dotchin’s intent was plain and cynical. It could have been any player, but it wasn’t. Things happen fast on the ice, but even in that split second, Dotchin must have known it was Matthews who was coming at him. And any chance to line up Matthews had the potential not only to affect the outcome of the game but also the games down the line—the help that Tampa Bay was going to need to get into the playoffs. There came a collective gasp from the crowd as Matthews lay facedown on the ice, and then boos rained down when the referees didn’t call a penalty.
Brian and Ema Matthews were in attendance. Though they hadn’t seen the knee-on-knee hit that had cost their son the first half of his under-17 season in Ann Arbor, they knew from his retelling that it had looked an awful lot like Dotchin’s. While Brian looked on impassively, Ema sat up in her seat and extended her hands, as if miming you’re-kidding-me.
There had been hearts-in-the-mouth moments earlier in the season. Fredrik Andersen had a reputation for fragility, but outside of the shot in the jaw that knocked him out of a game in Buffalo in late March, he had mostly held up. There had been worries about Marner’s ability to stand up to contact in the men’s league, but he had managed to stay out of harm’s way (with the exception of the hit Columbus’ Boone Jenner laid on him in February). And Tyler Bozak had been playing through a wrist injury that had kept him out of practice throughout the late winter and early spring. The Leafs’ 133 man-games-lost put the team sixth-best in the league, a remarkable fact given that so many young players were in the line-up. It would be tempting to put it down to dumb luck, though luck certainly had something to do with it. Behind the scenes, though, the Leafs’ medical staff had availed themselves of all that sports science had to offer to track the players’ health and well-being. In previous managements, health maintenance had been the subject of some second-guessing. The Leafs’ new style of play had to factor into it. It wasn’t a heavy game they played. It wasn’t a percussive one. The new Leafs gained the puck by diligence and speed, rather than knocking players along the wall into next week. Even on the blueline, outside of Polak, the big hits were few. Matthews skated into heavy traffic and went into the dirty areas boldly, but the likes of Nylander and Marner picked their spots and relied on stealth.
Thankfully, Matthews made it back into the Tampa game, not missing a shift. Watching him closely, though, you wondered if he was feeling the effects. He didn’t seem his usual self as the game got away from the Leafs.
The next day, Matthews noted that come the end of the season, everyone was playing with “something or another.” In the NHL, the wounded—at least those whose wounds are disclosed at all—are designated to have either “an upper-body injury” or “a lower-body injury.” If Matthews and the others were banged up, how much game would they have playing their fourth and fifth games in seven nights?
AFTER the loss to Tampa Bay, the irrational enthusiasm of the week before evaporated. The Leafs were entering the final weekend of the season needing two points from two games. Both games were at home, which was promising. Both, less promisingly, were against league heavyweights: defending Stanley Cup champions Pittsburgh, and then Columbus. If the Leafs’ historical run of bad luck held out, Babcock’s preseason prediction could be turned inside out with a couple of too easily imagined losses. The awful prospect loomed: that this young team might only fall out of playoff contention in Game 82.
The Penguins waddled in with nothing to play for in the last weekend of the season, having already tucked home-ice in the first round of the playoffs into their tiny little pockets. They didn’t have their best defencemen, Kris Letang and Olli Matta, available due to injury. They opted not to dress Evgeni Malkin, Chris Kunitz and Carl Hegelin—they were all listed as day-to-day, and coach Mike Sullivan had decided that this game was not going to be that particular day. A team with nothing to play for and a bunch of scrubs in the line-up seemed like easy picking.
But Sidney Crosby only has a push-button booster, no cruise control, no on-off toggle switch. And say what you will about Phil, but he’ll always be Kesseling. And while other players might not bring as much skill to the rink, anyone who steps on the ice is capable of mayhem. All of these combined to give Leafs’ fans agita right from the opening puck drop.
Kessel struck first, crossing up defenceman Morgan Rielly and wiring a shot past Frederik Andersen in the first period. The volume on the boos turned up when fans realized who had scored; they thought Kessel looked all too happy about it.
Early on, the Leafs’ best player was a veteran, one whose name had been a fixture in mid-season trade rumours: James van Riemsdyk. JVR tied the game a half minute after Kessel’s goal with a stunning bit of skill— in stride, deflecting a puck that was waist high and behind him as he split defenders at the blueline, and then deking Marc-Andre Fleury. On his next two shifts, van Riemsdyk had two other glorious scoring chances turned aside by Fleury. The rout and the playoffs were seemingly on JVR’s stick.
The scariest moment came with the game tied one-all a couple of minutes into the second period. Pittsburgh forward Tom Sesito earned a two-minute minor and the enduring enmity of Leafs’ fans when he clocked Andersen. Andersen was down on the ice, unmoving, for a good minute with a trainer hovering over him. Even when Andersen made it to his knees, it was clear he wasn’t fit to continue. Curtis McIlhenney was rushed back into service. On the ensuring powerplay, Nylander set up Tyler Bozak for the go-ahead goal, but a thin lead seemed like poor revenge and a poorer trade-off for the loss of the No. 1 goalie.
It looked less attractive when, a few minutes later, Crosby did what Crosby does. His league-leading 44th goal of the season came on the powerplay and knotted the game. The awful sinking feeling that the Leafs season might last only three more full periods crept into fans’ stomachs. And it only got worse. Seven minutes into the third, Pittsburgh rookie Jake Guentzal took a shot that was going wide of the net until Jake Gardiner tried to kick it up onto his stick. Instead, he kicked the puck past McElhinney. Gardiner, much criticized for making routine plays perilous and bad pinches at the worst times, bent over as a hush fell across the ACC. Pittsburgh had a 3-2 lead, and if the playoff bubble was going to burst, Gardiner’s own goal would be revisited over and over in the season’s wake.
It looked dark, often very dark, for the Maple Leafs’ run to a playoff berth all the way up to the 57th minute, when Gardiner’s self-esteem was salvaged by two rookies, albeit not the most likely ones.
Kaspari Kapanen had only been brought up to the team a couple of weeks before to fill in for the injured Nikita Soshnikov on the fourth line. The most valuable asset to come over from Pittsburgh in the Kessel trade, Kapanen had spent almost two full seasons with the Marlies, and in that time, he had been sidelined for long stretches with injuries, including a torn knee ligament in mid-season. In his time on the fourth line beside Boyle and Matt Martin, Kapanen had skated hard but accomplished little—there was no learning curve for him, no time to break in. Rather than shorten his bench and lean on Matthews’s and Bozak’s lines, Babcock had thrown the fourth line out on the ice with less than six minutes to go, and, with Martin and Boyle crowding Fleury, the puck came free to Kapanen. Fleury was sprawled on the ice with the net wide open—Kapanen didn’t miss. His goal produced a roar as new life pumped into the f’ns' veins.
Connor Brown had been buzzing Fleury’s net all night long. Fighting off a check in the slot, he managed to get his stick in a shot drifted by Morgan Rielly from the point. Fleury had no chance to react, and the Leafs were back in the lead. It was cause for a double take when the game score went up on the internet: Did Brown really have 20 goals on the season? That would have been enough to be the leading rookie scorer on 27 other NHL teams.
With Fleury pulled in favor of an extra skater in the last minute, McIlhenney made a couple of superior saves on Crosby to preserve the one-goal advantage. In the dying seconds, Matthews shot the puck into the vacated net, his 40th goal of the season, one that, like his winner in the Centennial Classic, paid out a six-figure bonus.
The Leafs had made the playoffs.
Coach Mike Babcock had an interesting take on it: To his mind, big games make veterans better and young guys nervous. Maybe that was true for JVR and McIhenney, among others, but in the end, it was a couple of rookies—unheralded ones at that—who made the difference in the Leafs’ biggest game in the four years since that awful night in Boston.
THANKS for reading. The manuscript went on to cover the series against the Caps which was more interesting than anyone ever imagined (another Kapanen highlight moment with the checking line in overtime). Yeah, this takes me back to a general euphoria around the franchise—who’d have guessed that this would be as good as it gets? Everyone should have, I suppose.
If I had written the jacket copy I would have suggested that the book was an in-depth look of what it’s like for young prospects to enter the pro ranks in 21st century or some such.