Maple Leafs taking it off the chin

But GM’s edict should have little effect on record

BEDFORD, N.S.— James Reimer arrived at Friday’s media scrum looking vaguely scruffy. It’s possible the Maple Leafs goaltender had arrived for the first day of training camp workouts having avoided a first-thing in the morning date with his razor.

And given the reputation of the man who heads the management team in Leafland — given GM Lou Lamoriello’s history of enforcing bans on facial hair — a reporter asked a question: “Is that shave close enough?” Said Reimer: “Who knows? We’ll see.” The Leafs are being cagey about whether Lamoriello has handed down an actual edict, written or spoken, about the specifics of the franchise’s grooming standards. But suffice it to say that there was a hair-free uniformity to almost all of the faces who took the ice as on-ice workouts began here on Friday. Even Jonathan Bernier, who’d previously worn a neatly trimmed, hipster-ap- proved beard since he arrived in Toronto in 2013, was freshly shaven. He may or may not have been happy about it.

“Actually I haven’t used a razor in so many years I can’t even remember,” he said. “But, you know, we’re all going to look professional now.”

Leo Komarov, a known enthusiast of handlebar goatees, looked as smoothcheeked as a schoolboy. “I just like to look good,” he explained. But had Komarov gone all baby-faced because of a team dictum?

“Yeah, maybe,” he said in one breath. Then he thought for a moment. “I have no idea,” he said. Indeed, it appears at least one of the Lou’s Rules goes like this: Don’t talk about Lou’s Rules.

“I’m not going to get into talking about what Lou expects. I think what is in our room stays in our room,” said Dion Phaneuf, the barbershop-fresh captain. “But Lou has expectations about how you’re supposed to act, about how you’re supposed to conduct yourselves.

“But we’ll leave what we talk about in our room.”

Still, if you were even vaguely aware of Lamoriello’s reputation as a 72-year-old conservative with no patience for non-conformity, and you were even remotely interested in making a good impression on the new head honcho, you shouldn’t have required a group email to make a trip to the drugstore for fresh blades.

“I’ve heard from numerous guys (around the NHL) that if you’re not clean shaven with a nice little haircut, you’re definitely going to get talked to,” said Matt Frattin, the forward from Edmonton. “It’s not like (Lamoriello) held a meeting or anything. It’s just an out-of-respect factor if Lou’s your GM . . . So everybody’s clean for training camp.”

Well, not everybody. Michael Grabner, traded to the Leafs in a deal announced Thursday, arrived at camp Friday sporting a healthy shadow of stubble, along with longish blond hair that would have looked at home in a grunge-rock band circa 1995. You could almost hear the tsk-tsking from the front office when he met with the media clad in a non-team-issued baseball cap spun backwards.

One can only assume Grabner’s appearance will set off some sort of organizational alarm. But will such an outdated standard be an organizational asset? Because, really: What’s the point?

There’s a more famous pro sports franchise that famously frowns upon facial hair. During the reign of late owner George Steinbrenner, the New York Yankees practised an on-again, off-again ban of the stuff that applies to this day. Steinbrenner, of course, counted Lamoriello as a close confidant. Back when the Yankees, Devils and NBA New Jersey Nets were owned by the same company, it was Steinbrenner who insisted Lamoriello run both the Devils and the Nets.

And while in charge of both teams, Lamoriello enforced a persnickety list of rules that were resented enough that employees had a nickname for their author: “Tal-Louban.”

Lamoriello was asked about his facial-hair policy earlier this year, before he was bumped from the Devils’ helm by new ownership.

“The word is called tradition. That’s the identity of the Devils organization,” he said in a Q&A with readers on NJ.com. “(Clean-shaven players) are part of the systemic points that have given us our identity, like our home and away jerseys.”

It hasn’t been a part of the Leafs identity since the club was run by Harold Ballard, whose successstarved reign was often synonymous with arbitrary, eccentric nonsense. Some of the most beloved players in franchise history eschewed a daily scrape, among them Wendel Clark and Lanny McDonald.

One of the most beloved athletes currently playing in Toronto, bearded Blue Jays ace David Price, has said he wouldn’t play for the Yankees so long as their throwback approach persists.

“I wouldn’t sign a long-term deal there,” he told Fox Sports in 2013. “Those rules, that’s old-school base- ball. I was born in ’85. That’s not for me.”

Forward-thinking franchises are figuring out ways to connect with players from the millennial generation, who often react to the imposition of team rules with a single question: “Why?” That kind of curious audacity has been known to offend followers of the Vince Lombardi school of unquestioning loyal service, such as Lamoriello.

The answer, in this case, essentially comes down to “because I said so.” As Steinbrenner acknowledged back in 1995, his facial-hair ban “had nothing to do with the winning or losing. We have a lot of good-looking guys on this team, and I was tired of seeing them in beards that made them not so good-looking.”

The Boss said it: It has nothing to do with winning, which is enough to make anyone wonder why a franchise that hasn’t seen hide nor hair of a respectable playoff beard in more than a decade would give it a second of thought.