Reward for Leafs is hair of the underdog
For two seasons now, it’s been a Maple Leaf routine — daily for most, resented by some, hated by many. If you’ve been a member of the Toronto’s NHL team, you’ve been cleanshaven, or something close enough.
Such is the reality of one of Lou’s rules — a rare carryover from general manager Lou Lamoriello’s days as presiding dictator of the New Jersey Devils that has been embraced by Lamoriello’s colleagues in Toronto’s brain trust, wherein team president Brendan Shanahan has the ultimate say about such things and coach Mike Babcock isn’t shy about offering input.
So with Toronto’s widely unexpected playoff breakthrough has come a quietly celebrated reward — the right to grow playoff beards. By Tuesday, when the Leafs gathered for practice in advance of Thursday’s playoff opener in Washington, D.C., plenty of players appeared to be taking advantage of the loosening of the governance over grooming.
“(Shaving regularly) definitely isn’t the funnest thing in the world,” Matt Martin, the veteran grinder, was saying, sporting the kind of stubble that would have previously been deemed unacceptable. “Especially on a team where you have to shave and keep it tight every day, it’ll be nice to throw the razors away and just let it go.”
As the Leafs were put through their media paces on Tueday, the idea of letting it go — of playing with the nothing-to-lose abandon of an underdog — was one of the recurring themes. The Capitals, the Presidents’ Trophy winners, are the overwhelming favourites to win the best-of-seven series. Washington’s goal differential, plus-81 over 82 games, dwarfs Toronto’s modest plus-9. Its puck-possession numbers are among the elite in the league. The Capitals’ league-best 32 wins in 41home games suggest they know how to dominate at the Verizon Center.
As impressive as all that is, Babcock pointed out that there’s a weight attached to it, too. He knows this from experience, having coached a President’s Trophy-winning team in Detroit in 2006 whose players barely had time to grow five o’clock shadows before they were eliminated in the first round.
“Until you’ve been the best seed, and until you’ve had the whole city expecting (a Stanley Cup), you don’t know what that’s like, and how good a defence that is for the underdog. It’s unbelievable,” Babcock said. “My first year in Detroit, I never experienced anything like it. I couldn’t believe how we couldn’t skate or pass. So pressure (on the favourite) is a wonderful thing when you’re the underdog.”
Which is not the say there’s no pressure on Toronto’s hockeyists. On Tuesday the Maple Leafs seemed all too happy to embrace mood-lightening topics of conversation as a welcome tonic to hard-core hockey talk.
“The less you think (about hockey), the better,” said Leo Komarov, the sagely Finn. “You need your mind to be somewhere else at some point.”
More than one Leafian mind seemed to be trained on coming up with zingers to throw at Mitch Marner, the 19-year-old rookie whose upper lip is inhabited by a substance he freely describes as “peach fuzz.” Said Martin, speaking of his pal Marner: “I think he’s been growing (a playoff beard) all season.”
Connor Brown, Marner’s dressingroom neighbour, happily piled on with a detailed observation of Marner’s wispy collection of whiskers.
“If you get the light hitting it in the right direction, you can see it,” Brown said.
Which doesn’t make Marner unique. Fellow fresh-faced rookies Auston Matthews and William Nylander aren’t threatening to rival San Jose’s Brent Burns in the race for hockey’s most formidable beard. And if that’s meant for easy maintenance during the regular season, it isn’t perfectly conducive to team bonding at a moment such as this.
Marner recalled how, as a junior with the London Knights, he used the occasion of one playoff spring to darken the light-coloured hair on his lip with Just For Men — a product marketed to oldsters looking to take the grey out of their game.
“It had no effect on me at all. Nothing. Maybe we’ll give it a try again. Maybe not,” Marner said. “It might look terrible on me, so play it safe.”
Playing it safe, since Lamoriello arrived in Toronto, has meant a routine regular-season scrape of the facial region, not to mention a timely barber-shop haircut. Players say Lamoriello has likened the mandate to a sports-related simulation of army basic training — mandatory conformism for the sake of the communal good. The beginning of playoff time, to continue Lamoriello’s militaristic trope, is the moment a well-trained troop heads off into battle.
“Obviously Lou’s old school. During the season it’s about looking professional. Everyone looks the same. It’s about the Toronto Maple Leafs,” Martin said. “And then playoff time, it’s a whole new animal. It’s time to go to war. And hopefully find a way to win a Cup.”
Said Connor Brown, already sprouting a healthy harvest of ginger stubble: “(A playoff beard) symbolizes what playoffs are all about — it’s a fight. The farther you go, the more fight you have, and the more weathered you look. This whole thing is to be able to grow it as big as you can.”
Who will grow the biggest beard among the blue and white? There was a growing consensus around the room that Roman Polak, the exceptionally hairy Czech, will be difficult to beat. “Roman’s a safe bet,” said Brown. But there are those with faith in Brian Boyle’s bona fides. Boyle has, after all, played 100 career playoff games — most in the league since 2011. Frederik Andersen, the goaltender who practised Tuesday in the wake of leaving Sunday’s game with an injury, theorized that Boyle’s beard has been somehow conditioned to flourish this time of year.
“All those playoff games — he knows what he’s doing,” Andersen said.
There was a time when playoff beards weren’t standard-issue accoutrements of the NHL spring. Wayne Gretzky was never confused with a mountain man all those times he hoisted the Stanley Cup. Ditto Mario Lemieux. But Marner, who comes with a reputation for clutch playoff performances as a junior, aspires to the grizzled look some day.
“I think you look a lot meaner with it,” Marner said. “It’s kind of more wild man. I think that’s what you’ve got to be in the playoffs — more crazy and more wild.”
Not that everybody on the team sees April scruff as the gold standard of handsomeness.
“For me, you want to look good,” Leo Komarov said. “So when you have a beard, you don’t really look good.” It took Komarov a moment to realize that, as he spoke, he was standing in the company of a reporter who regularly covers the team — a man whose boss apparently allows him to wear a beard all year round.
“Maybe if you have it that way, you look good,” Komarov said, motioning to the reporter. “But if you look like me, it looks (bleeping) terrible.”