Leafs going all in with Marleau addition, although you won’t hear them saying it

Before he became a Leaf on Sunday, Patrick Marleau hemmed and hawed.

And you can understand why the decision was difficult. Yes, the Maple Leafs offered Marleau a whopper of a threeyear contract worth an annual average of $6.25 million — an impressive haul for a man who will turn 38 in September, and one that came complete with a full nomovement clause. But until Sunday the San Jose Sharks were the only NHL team Marleau had ever known. He was drafted by the Sharks, second overall, 20 years ago last month. He is San Jose’s all-time leader in games played, goals and points. So contemplating a move from Silicon Valley to the centre of the hockey universe, and taking into account the feelings of his wife and four children, had to be complicated stuff.

“I think I’ve worn out a few carpets pacing around the house, trying to make this decision the past few days,” Marleau said Sunday. But you know who didn’t hem and haw about Marleau coming to Toronto? Leafs coach Mike Babcock, who knows Marleau from Canada’s gold-medal runs at the 2010 and 2014 Olympics, and who’d been pushing hard for Marleau’s acquisition. Marleau is the kind of uber-experienced consummate professional that Babcock values highly; the kind of guy who “knows where to stand,” as the coach loves to say.

And so Marleau’s presence in Toronto says a lot. It says, for one, that Babcock generally gets what Babcock wants. Earlier this year, with the Leafs on the verge of making the playoffs, Babcock advocated for the acquisition of Brian Boyle and Boyle’s 100 career playoff games. Toronto GM Lou Lamoriello burned a second-round pick to make it happen, even if Boyle was a short-term rental.

Now, only a few months removed from playing five overtime games with the Washington Capitals in a six-game first-round near-miss, this past weekend’s free-agent haul says the Maple Leafs are tripling down on the value of been-there, donethat leadership.

Not that Marleau can claim to be synonymous with playoff success. Eight of his 17 trips to the postseason have ended in first-round defeats. Still, he is an incredibly durable player who has appeared in 199 career playoff games. And when you combine his work with the resumes of Toronto’s two other free-agent pickups — forward Dominic Moore and defenceman Ron Hainsey, both 36 — you get a trio of oldsters who’ve played a combined 301post-season contests.

You know Lou Lamoriello’s five- year plan that changes every day? On Saturday and Sunday it placed a confident foot on the throttle. And why wouldn’t the Leafs slam the gas with some gusto? The Eastern Conference is as gettable for them as it is for anyone. Yes, the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Penguins reside in the East. But if repeating as titlists had proved previously undoable in the cap era, one has to imagine the three-peat is all but impossible. Toronto, which finished last season a point ahead of the Cup finalist Predators in the standings, already showed it was a bounce or two away from beating since-diminished Washington.

Babcock spent some of this past season comparing the Leafs of Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner and William Nylander to the Chicago Blackhawks in the early years of Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. The Toews-Kane Blackhawks made the Western final in their second year and won the Stanley Cup in their third.

So as much as Lamoriello tried Sunday to keep up the ruse of low expectations — insisting the pace of the building plan had changed only in “perception” but “not in reality” — well, let’s just say nobody’s buying it anymore. These free-agent moves tell us everything we need to know about how Leafs management sees the Leafs. They see them as contenders, not just in some fuzzy future, but in the now.

“I can assure everyone that we’re not off-course on what the plan is,” Lamoriello said. “This just ensures the development process is (going) in the right direction.”

You don’t exactly need to be as ancient as Marleau, mind you, to remember a time when acquiring high-priced veterans at the tail end of their careers was a go-to Leaf-ian misstep. Maybe this one’s different. Still, in a league ruled by young speed, players of a certain age need to prove they can keep up on a daily basis.

Babcock, though, clearly believes in Marleau. “Even if he doesn’t score the goals, he can skate,” the coach told Nick Cotsonika of NHL.com. “He can play against the best people and do it right every night.”

This is a low-risk transaction. No prospects or draft picks were sacrificed. Marleau has been brought here with money the Leafs had to spend, because they’ve still got two seasons of relative salary-cap bliss before extensions to Matthews and Marner will call for harder choices.

“You only have one chance to do something like this and we would not have done it if it was not the right player,” Lamoriello said. “The timing is perfect.”

Perfect for a team bent on more playoff success, and perfect for a veteran clearly seeking a change.

“It was the team, the excitement that’s around it, the youth, the coaching staff, the coach, the management, the way they see the game going, the players that they have on their roster,” Marleau said. “It’s extremely exciting to be a part of that.”