National Post (National Edition)
TSN whiffed in omitting Gilmour, Sittler as elite Leafs
Both were steady producers for loved teams
You can’t put together an all-time Toronto Maple Leafs team, under whatever odd and circumstantial perimeters you choose, and not have Doug Gilmour and Darryl Sittler in the lineup.
It’s elementary, really.
Yet TSN did it.
Their all-time Leafs team announced Monday somehow left off the most explosive, most exciting, most franchise-changing player of the past half century in Gilmour and left off the greatest scoring Maple Leaf in team history. If I didn’t know some of the people involved in making this choice — and I know them well — I would think this was simply done to create some noise and get some kind of reaction.
But they have too much credibility and hockey acumen to go that way, even when there isn’t much going on. They’re doing what they believe is right here.
So here I am, reacting. To a list that really doesn’t matter. But it matters to me because Gilmour was left off. And I have a long history covering Gilmour.
When I covered the Calgary Flames in the 1980s, they played St. Louis in an NHL semifinal in 1986. Gilmour was on St. Louis. You couldn’t take your eye off him. That year he became one of the few players in NHL history to lead the playoffs in scoring without getting to the final round.
Then he got traded to Calgary, where he played a significant role in winning the Flames their only Cup in 1989. Then he was traded to Toronto after a contract dispute and it was magic time, like we’ve never seen before, never seen since.
A Maple Leafs team picked to miss the playoffs got within a game of the Stanley Cup final in 1993, primarily because the diminutive Gilmour picked them up and carried them. He scored 1.66 points a game in the post-season of 1993. Think about that on any scale of any time. No one in Leaf history is even close to that.
Twenty seven years later, the Leafs have never been within one game of the Cup and have never had seasons the likes of which Gilmour played here, never seen a player who grabbed a team and a city and a fan base and pulled them all along for the ride.
Dave Keon’s championship teams had an exaggerated 10 or more Hall of Fame players. Some belong, some you can argue don’t, but it was never about one man at any time. They had Johnny Bower and Terry Sawchuk in goal. They had Tim Horton on defence. They had Red Kelly and Frank Mahovlich and Bob Pulford and George Armstrong up front. All but Kelly are on the TSN list. And when they won their last Cup, Jim Pappin lead the team in scoring.
The Sittler years, longer than Gilmour’s, weren’t that much different. He was homegrown and once he found his legs he had a nine-year period of offensive dominance where he averaged 92 points per season. In Sundin’s brilliant standalone career, he scored over 90 points just once with the Leafs. Sittler’s career highlight was not the 10-point game, as often as that comes up. It was the 21 points he scored in nine playoff games in 1977.
When he was the only centre to check against.
That’s 2.33 points per game in two rounds of playoffs. You can’t leave someone off an all-time list with Sittler’s numbers. He was in the top three in Hart Trophy voting three different times, and was top 10 in NHL scoring six times.
Based on the rules of selection, there had to be a current Leaf player on the TSN team. They chose Auston Matthews at centre. At the deepest position in team history. There is Gilmour, Sittler, Kelly, all deserving, left off the team. And Keon, Syl Apps, Ted Kennedy, Sundin on the team with Matthews, which he may be deserving of one day. Not yet. Not without a single playoff round of victory among these giants.
The historically weakest position in Leafs history is defence. There are two true all-timers in Salming and Horton. And after that, it’s a lot of reaching. Or going way back in history. Like 90 years back. TSN put King Clancy and Red Horner on the team. The third pair had Allan Stanley and Bob Baun, both from the championship teams of the 1960s.
Stanley is somehow in the Hall of Fame, and almost everybody who was anyone on that Leafs team is in. Baun didn’t make the Hall. That may have been political. But the fact is he didn’t make it probably tells you he was mostly a middle-of-theroad defenceman. We don’t know what Morgan Rielly will be yet, but we do know he’s something above middle of the road. Craig Button, one of the TSN selectors of this team, had Rielly on his Canadian Olympic team if there is an NHL Olympics in China in 2022.
But they left Rielly off here. It would have been easy to slide Rielly into a spot on defence, opening up Matthews’ spot at centre, gaining one place for Gilmour and I would have left off Kennedy for Sittler.
Does any of this really matter? No. Except in one way. It degrades Gilmour and degrades Sittler. And both deserve better than that.
What Gilmour managed as a Maple Leaf tops anything any other Leafs player has done post-expansion. As we sit around waiting for hockey to return, the world to be safer and for a year in which the Leafs actually win a playoff round of any kind, what Gilmour accomplished should never be lessened, especially from a network that has taken hockey coverage to its highest heights.
IT WAS A MAGIC TIME, LIKE WE’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE (OR) SINCE.