Phaneuf’s contentious tenure with Leafs surely at an end
Dion, we hardly knew you.
Which sounds like a premature and pre-emptive farewell, unseemly in haste, but let’s call a spade a spade.
If Dion Phaneuf is back with the Maple Leafs when training camp opens in September, the off-season will have been a bust.
As president Brendan Shanahan put it forthrightly in his out-go State of the Union address Monday: “We need to have a team with better character. We have to have people that represent this city and represent this team as it deserves. I think that we have an incredibly loyal, resilient fan base. We need to have an incredibly resilient group of players that love to play in Toronto.”
Which Phaneuf might say — and did say, essentially — about himself in his final scrum of the spring, a forlorn ashen-skinned man in the middle of a ridiculously humongous media mob; that the job as Leaf-in-chief, while onerous at times, as much off the ice as on, is one he has no desire to relinquish.
Doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t want to quit town nor team, has no wish to cede the captaincy and isn’t looking for fresh starts in less hockey intense surroundings.
Six seasons in Toronto, six years before the mast, and probably among the least loved Leafs ever — in inverse proportion to his salary, his contract term, his ice time, his minus numbers and that stigmata “C” carved on his forehead, like a crown of thorns.
Those are easy grumps to seize upon in the search for a villain, in a city where just about everybody thinks they’re hockey-savvy, smarter than Shanahan, smarter than the jettisoned Dave Nonis, smarter than the revolving door of coaches.
(Although, as Shanahan also made clear, his is the only opinion that ultimately counts, the only plan that will have traction and the plan won’t necessarily remain static over the months to come. It’s a moving target, this whole Leaf rebuild thing.)
Anyway, Phaneuf is among the blamed brigade now, as the players tiptoe out of town, doubtlessly glad to put the whole horror of 2014-15 (actually just 2015) behind them, because there’s nothing left to say, really, because it’s all been examined to death, because it’s been Groundhog Day in Leaf orbit since early January.
Though, again, Shanahan did have rather a lot to say about Leaf matters, in the aftermath of the fran- chise blood-letting, the hockey pogrom, that had swept through 40 Bay St. 24 hours earlier.
Phaneuf had been saying, over recent days, that he was saving it all up for locker clean-out day, whatever was on his mind, in his heart. For a mad moment, I even thought he’d stand up there in front of reporters and demand a trade — do the proud thing and take ownership of his destiny, say screw-you Toronto, who needs this? Get ahead of it, as the spin doctors advise.
But no, of course not. Polite and reserved, as usual, hesitant in speech as always; opaque and even phlegmatic.
“I feel that this year, personally, I didn’t play well enough. My numbers reflect that. In the offensive side of the game, I didn’t produce where I expected to produce. And I feel that affected our team’s success.
“There’s a reason why we’re standing here answering these questions. We have put ourselves in this position to have to stand here and answer these questions.”
But hankering for an escape valve from Toronto? Absolutely not.
“I expect to be back. I signed here for seven years. I want to remain a Toronto Maple Leaf. It’s an honour to play in this city, for this organization and I expect to be back.” Oh Dion. You poor thing. However culpable — or not — this is a team that must cut its ties to the leadership cadre, Phaneuf front and centre, that could not summon an iota of commitment or passion from most of the lineup down the godawful stretch, but neither in the two months before that, when there were repeated opportunities for the Leafs to salvage the season, some virtue to move forward with.
When Shanahan was asked directly about the leadership bona fides of this core Leaf rump, whether they had shown any stuff of the right stuff, he didn’t duck: “The obvious answer to that is, as a group, no. They know it, we know it, everyone here today knows it.”
Yet Phaneuf presents himself as pretty much clueless about what went wrong and when.
“We didn’t play well. That’s a vague answer but for me, the consistency . . . we could not find, we could not find our game and the results showed that.”
The flat effect of it, the relentlessness of an utterly lost season — “a wasted season” as Joffrey Lupul admitted — ground Phaneuf down.
“This was for me the toughest year that I’ve had in my career. The main thing is that we did not play well enough and I take responsibility for me not playing well enough, for our team. When you lose the amount of games that we lost, it takes a toll on you. It wears on you day after day, and it makes it a long year.”
We judge Phaneuf for deficiencies on the ice, and that’s fair. But we judge him as well for what he alleg- edly doesn’t bring off the ice; for not being that guy who could have grabbed his team by the throat and forced them to smarten up.
Yet perhaps, unbeknownst to us, Phaneuf actually is that fellow. Certainly his teammates made the case.
Lupul: “What he shows on camera is a lot different from who he is. Because he’s a fun-loving guy, he’s always talking, he’s the most vocal guy in the room. He’s the leader of the team. He doesn’t show that with the media at all. He gives boring interviews, right? I’ve known him since I was 16 years old and he’s one of my best friends. Obviously, he gets a lot of the criticism here, which comes with being the captain and having a long-term deal. But he’s our best defenceman and some of it is a little bit unfair.”
Jake Gardiner: “He’s a great captain, a good leader, a good friend of mine. He’s very vocal and he’ll compete every single night on the ice. Off the ice, he’s the same way, a competitive guy, whether it’s pingpong or basically anything. And that’s good. You want your leader to be a competitive person.
“When we don’t succeed he takes a lot of blame. But he’s OK with that. He expects that, too.”
Not the man we’ve documented in the media these past half-dozen years; a stranger to me, as described above. And who’s fault that is, the disconnect, I can’t say.
“Maybe you see a different side of me than they do,” Phaneuf suggested, referring to his ’mates. “I don’t know how I can explain it much more than, when I’m in here, I’ve got a job to do and I take that very seriously, when I’m talking in the dressing room.
“A lot of the time, I’m very emotional after a game or after a practice. I’m an emotional guy.’’ Could have fooled me. “Maybe I keep that for behind closed doors.”
But he was touched by the accolades from other Leafs in the room.
“For my teammates to speak the way they do about me, it means a lot. That’s the one thing for me that, on a day like today, when you know that it’s over for the season. You go for dinner with the guys, you see everyone today and then you shake everyone’s hand. And you say bye for another summer.”
You say bye, I would venture, forever.