SHANAHAN FINE WITH LEAFS’ PATH OF DEVELOPMENT
President says he wants players to always feel the pressure to win the Stanley Cup
As a player in the National Hockey League, one who skated in more than 1,500 games and hoisted the Stanley Cup three times with the Detroit
Red Wings, Brendan Shanahan understood that consistent winning wasn’t something a team achieved quickly.
As the president of the Maple Leafs, Shanahan would love nothing more than to raise the Cup again. He has watched as the club has had some major bumps in 2019-20, but is firm in his belief the players will come out better for it.
“Adversity is something you can either meet and grow from, or you can use it as an excuse,” Shanahan said during a rare scrum with reporters on Thursday at the Staples Center. “I like to think that our players are not using it as an excuse. It’s difficult to become a good team in the NHL, but I think it’s even more difficult to become an elite team.
“One of the biggest separations between the elite teams and the good teams is consistency. That’s something we are trying to learn and develop, that ability to come out with that same peak effort. You’re never going to do it all 82 games in a row, but certainly doing it more often than not, but that’s something our guys are learning and something I’m very confident they are going to continue to grow at.”
When the Leafs have bad games — and there have been some extremely bad ones, none as embarrassing as losing to emergency goalie David Ayres and the Carolina Hurricanes on Feb. 22 — one can’t forget that progress has been made under Sheldon Keefe.
Before the Leafs played the
Los Angeles Kings on Thursday, Keefe, while guiding the team through injuries to core players, had a record of 26-14-4 after taking over from Mike Babcock, who was fired on Nov. 20.
“I think he has been great,” Shanahan said of Keefe. “What I said on that day when he was introduced, and it’s still how
I feel today, it’s great to have an entire management group from myself to Kyle (Dubas) to Sheldon that are aligned. It’s not to say you can take a snapshot picture of our team on any one day and say ‘This is it, we’re done, we’ve finished adding to our group.’ It’s always going to take some evolving and some tweaks, but I really like the job Sheldon has done.”
Still, Toronto remains in a tough fight for a playoff spot, with a five-point bulge on the Florida Panthers (prior to Thursday) for third place in the Atlantic Division with a month remaining in the regular season.
Why is it hard for a team to go from good to great?
“The ability of great teams to have fewer bad games, also a sense of occasion of knowing when a game is a must-win game, I think that that’s something that comes with time and experience,” Shanahan said. “Playing in Toronto can speed that up because our fans are so passionate. I see that as an advantage that the expectations are high in that regard. I have all the confidence in the world that we’re going to get there. We’re going to continue to power through this.”
When the Leafs added players such as Tyson Barrie, Alex Kerfoot and Jason Spezza last summer, the in-house thinking was that contending for the Cup was not far off. The additions of Kyle Clifford and Jack Campbell during the season have been a benefit, and while a Cup this spring likely is a pipe dream at best, Shanahan wants the players to not only feel the heat around them, but to react to it properly.
“When I was playing for Jim Rutherford (with the Hartford Whalers), he came into our dressing room with about 12 games to go (one season) and sort of took the pressure off of us and said that it didn’t all ride on this year,” Shanahan said.
“I loved Jim, but I hated that message as a player. I wanted to have that pressure that we had to win this year. I’ll never take that pressure off our guys to say this is a long-term thing. It really is about now. But the truth of the matter is right: This is about how we develop and how we grow.”
I’ll never take that pressure off our guys to say this is a long-term thing. It really is about now.