These magnetic Maple Leafs
Veterans have been drawn to this young and improving team
Day one of lord knows how many, and what is there to say, really? The Toronto Maple Leafs were unexpectedly delightful last season and showed signs of future greatness, but future greatness doesn’t arrive all at once on one day, because future greatness is not the new smart TV you ordered from Best Buy to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Still, the Leafs are bristling with potential, which they are happy to describe in very non-specific, reasonable-caveat-laced ways. Take it away, boys.
“I think we just want to take a step forward,” said centre Auston Matthews.
“Certainly the bar’s been raised a little bit,” said winger James van Riemsdyk.
“There’s just a lot more confidence in the room,” said centre Tyler Bozak. “A lot of years we’ve come in and not been as confident a group as we are now, and I think that’s the biggest thing.”
“Teams know that the Maple Leafs are serious this year,” said centre Nazem Kadri. “We want to hang with the best, and we certainly believe we can do that.”
Kadri is always a little more effusive than others. It’s good to have him back.
This is the year the Leafs make the turn, one way or the other. Either they become the team they think they can be — a hellacious mix of skilled speed up front with enough reasonable defenceman at the back in front of a goalie whose baseline workload is 60 games — or things go wrong, and they are thrown off track. That’s the range. These Leafs are stacked, and they know they’re stacked. Time to prove it.
“We definitely had some good experi- ences and learned a lot of things, so hopefully we can channel that in the right way and go from there,” van Riemsdyk said. “Everyone starts in the same point, so it doesn’t matter how much buzz or hype or positivity you have around your group: you have to go out there and prove it on the ice every night, and hopefully we’re ready for that.”
“I usually used to say, if you’re (still) playing on my birthday (on April 29), you’ve had a good year, that means you’re starting the third round,” coach Mike Babcock said. “I haven’t seen a third round since I can’t remember how long. I miss you media guys so much, we’re going to play longer this spring.”
Leaving aside that if you were playing on April 29 last year, you were still early in the second round, Babcock tends to share the cockiness that Kadri carries around. After winning the World Cup of Hockey here last year, Babcock exited his press conference by saying, “This is just a sign of what’s going to happen here in Toronto, just so you know.”
Asked about potentially hypothetical fans who think this team is going to sweep over the NHL like a firestorm, Babcock said, “The fans are smart, they see what we see, and they probably would like everything to happen right away. We’re all like that. Immediate gratification is what the world is all about, but usually it’s not like that. You have to keep getting better and better.”
“We like our situation, we like our fan base, we think we have the best hockey city in the world, for sure. Being a Leaf is a special thing again, and we’re all lucky to be that.”
Let’s be honest: the Leafs have been special to this city for a long time, but have only been special in the good hockey sense for rare and memorable periods over the last 50 years. A team with Auston Matthews — whose even-strength goals as a teenaged rookie trailed Gretzky’s rookie season 37 to 32 in an era where goals are harder to come by — plus Mitch Marner, plus William Nylander, plus the rest of the young, fast, fearless apparatus, could be special. Or at least, become special.
But of course the kids say they’re ready to step forward. What about the others? Ask veterans like forward Patrick Marleau and defenceman Ron Hainsey — one of whom spent 19 years excelling but falling short in San Jose, one of whom won a Cup with Pittsburgh last season — why they chose the Leafs as free agents.
“Everybody’s different, and some people would certainly not like Toronto’s attention,” Hainsey said. “Having said that, I think in the past, could someone say, ‘It’s a bad team, but we’ll use the market as an excuse?’ I’m just talking out loud, I have no idea. For me, this system, this team, the entire staff that they’ve built here, this was the team when I had to start picking teams, this was a team I wanted to come too. Market big, or small. That’s really it.”
“It just felt right to me,” Marleau said. “I think coming here with the group of players they have, the prospects they have, the coaching, the management, everything just looked to be a good fit for me. That’s why I came. Definitely the skill level, but definitely what I like to see, even in the summer skates, is the compete level. Those guys lose the puck, they want it back right away, and that’s something you can win games with, being able to compete game in and game out.”
They believed. A lot will be said about these Leafs. That’s the same every year, more or less. There’s always conversation. But this time, it should sound different.