No. 92: JIM HULTON & MITCH MARNER / Sometimes you gotta swallow hard and plead mea culpa. Sometimes you regret not going bolder.

Two brief stories about stories. The first makes me wish I had a do-over for having wronged a guy. The second still makes me wonder whether my judgment call was the right one. Regrets, I've had a few.

YOU have to make some tough calls if you write about sports long enough—say, a couple of weeks. Yeah, by the time you collect your first paycheque, you’ll have one under your belt that your journalism ethics class didn’t prepare you for. After that, you’re off to the races.

Over the years I’ve second-guessed a few judgment calls for a variety of reasons. I’ll beat myself up over two stories today. The first features a hockey coach who flies under the major media’s radar. The second features a much-discussed NHL First All-Star. (Yeah, I know. Take a wild guess.)

I hope you find my self-flagellation more amusing than I do.

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I have given a hard time to a few of people that I wish I hadn’t. Label it as critic’s remorse.

It’s with some regret that I’ve always looked back on a story about the Mississauga Ice Dogs, the Ontario expansion team that Don Cherry disastrously launched in the late ‘90s. The lead of my feature about the worst trainwreck of a franchise in major-junior history gives you a good idea of the direction of the piece that ran in the National Post back in February of 2000. (I can safely categorize it as “the worst train wreck” because at the Ice Dogs would win 16 games in total in their first three seasons in the league, 173 losses in regulation, 11 ties and two more losses in overtime.)

I’ve written about Cherry a couple of times recently—most pointedly, about getting trashed by him when I criticized Phil Esposito for the then Tampa Bay GM’s misogynistic bullying of a reporter. Mounting his cathode soapbox, Cherry defended his toxic buddy Esposito and went ad hominem on me. That was back when I was writing for the Globe and Mail back in 1996.

About four years later in this National Post piece I teed off on Cherry’s mismanagement of the Ice Dogs. Nothing personal … okay, sweet schadenfreude, but c’mon! What could I say that would be remotely positive about that organization? The debacle was embarrassing its celebrity owner and the league that granted him a franchise; worse, it was utterly wasting the one chance a bunch of teenagers were going to get to play major-junior hockey, one of them being the aforementioned Jason Spezza.

Unfortunately, I caught an innocent guy in the crossfire: Jim Hulton, who signed on coach the Ice Dogs midway through their first season.

I didn’t think I was taking a cheap shot there. Hulton had been an OHL assistant in North Bay for a season and had coached Tier II previously. What I wrote accurately reflected informed opinion around the OHL. (Called three GMs and coaches, talked to a couple of agents. Safe ground.)

Nor did I think I unfairly buried Hulton when I pointed out Cherry’s rationale for signing him.

In fairness, Hulton was neither the problem nor the solution—fact is, no coach this side of Tarasov and Toe Blake could have walked in the door and turned Mississauga into a respectable team. How would you even measure progress? In season two, Hulton’s single full season with the Ice Dogs, they won nine games—doesn’t sound like much across a 68-game schedule, but it represented a significant improvement on Year One. When Geoff Ward, an established OHL coach, took over from Hulton, he recognized what his predecessor had been working with (and without); Ward stepped down in next to no time.

Jim Hulton went on to coach in the OHL down the line and I thought he did a good job in Belleville and Kingston, making the playoffs five times in six seasons, advancing to the second round twice—not a miracle worker, but still pretty solid. Funny how having a few players really helps. And on the basis of what he did in Belleville and Kingston he found work as an assistant to Peter DeBoer with the Florida Panthers for three seasons. Hulton later took the head coaching job in Charlottetown in 2015 and since then the Islanders have had a few deep runs in the QMJHL playoffs, making the finals last year.

So, yeah, I should have given Jim Hulton a fairer shake. He wasn’t a villain in Mississauga, just another victim. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, didn’t really make him the wrong guy. And it’s strange how things work out. I moved to Kingston which is famously Don Cherry’s hometown. It’s also Jim Hulton’s—a lot of the people I know here casually know him pretty well and whenever his name comes up (which it does frequently), well, I wince a bit and shift in my seat uncomfortably. By all accounts, a stand-up guy. Yeah, I was that asshole who kicked him when he was down.

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SOMETIMES, though, you can cut someone too much slack. I have a solid batting average with snap decisions, intuitive choices, when I have to turn around a story in a hurry. I don’t do so well when I have the luxury of time for judgment calls. I’m too often guilty of over-thinking stuff.

A bestseller but not my best aesthetically, quite frankly.

That was the case when I was writing this book about the rookies on the Toronto Maple Leafs back in the 2016-17 season. Yeah, that’s when the centre of the hockey universe got its first good look at a rookie class for the ages, which included Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander. (Never mind that the biggest goal of the season, one that put the Leafs into the playoffs, was scored by another rookie, Connor Brown …

… and it was yet another rook, Kasperi Kapanen, languishing most of the season in the AHL, who picked up a stunning double-OT goal in the playoffs against Washington.)

The second of two bones thrown to dogged Leafs fans. No Nikita Zaitsev or Antoine Bibeau content here though.

Matthews, Marner and Nylander were the key figures in the book, which was really more of a state-of-the-game number than a personality-driven three-headed biography. Their respective journeys to the NHL were a pretty interesting study in contrasts—coming up in very different cultures in the evolving game.

I have no regrets about the narratives I wove about Auston Matthews and William Nylander. Mitch Marner, though, was another story. Here I think I cut someone too much slack. Not Mitch Marner, mind you. I’m going to limit the rest of the story here to paid subscribers. I’m sure anyone who cares to keep reading can sign up for a trial subscription.