No room here for complacency
If you’re a contrarian at heart or a doomsayer for fun, you can easily spin a scenario in which the 101st season in Maple Leafs history disintegrates into a million pieces.
Maybe the injuries the players mostly avoided a season ago, when they played the Washington Capitals to six one-goal games in a firstround playoff loss, arrive like a plague in the coming six months. Maybe Frederik Andersen, the one and only option as the No. 1 goaltender, can’t provide his expected 60-some starts. Maybe bad things will happen, even amid the good signs and great young talent gracing the centre of the hockey universe.
But don’t bet on it. As the Leafs assemble in Niagara Falls on Friday to drop the puck on a three-day kickoff to training camp, the instinctive annual forecasts of impending peril in the centre of the hockey universe aren’t exactly ringing as relevant.
More prosperity is much more likely. Stanley Cup contention seems closer at hand than a postseason miss. And that’s at least partly because the Leafs, thanks to a talent-procurement operation with a recent track record that ranks among the best in the game, have created sufficient depth to foster the kind of healthy internal competition that figures to keep complacency at bay.
At the top end of the roster, there’s still a run-off for a coveted letter. On Thursday head coach Mike Babcock said the Maple Leafs will go a second straight season without award- ing the “C.” And while Auston Matthews, the league’s reigning rookie of the year and the team’s best player, is widely expected to eventually earn the honour — perhaps next summer, to coincide with a Connor McDavid-esque contract extension? — it makes sense to keep the franchise’s options open.
And even if the team’s best young players aren’t actually in a competition for the captaincy, they’re certainly competing for cap space. It won’t be long until Matthews, William Nylander and Mitch Marner are Toronto’s three highest-paid players. How they fare in their coming sophomore season figures to heavily influence exactly how highly paid each becomes. Which is not to suggest there’s impending conflict at hand, only some high-skill, oneupsmanship that will surely benefit the Leafs.
As Babcock said last year: “It’s nice to have lots of good players. They can compete to see who’s the best player.”
Further down the roster, the coming few weeks before the Oct. 4 season opener in Winnipeg promises to be an intense proving ground. For one, as the head coach gleefully pointed out on Thursday, “there are too many NHL forwards for the amount of spots.” Which is exactly the way Babcock likes it.
“You have good depth when you have 10 top-nine forwards and I believe we have that,” the coach said. “The eight exhibition games (beginning Monday night at Ottawa) are for players as individuals to fight for their chunk of cheese — or whether you’ll be the first call-up to the American league or first to the NHL, or power play, penalty kill, (get a) regular shift or (play) 16 minutes to 18 minutes.”
Baseball has spring training. Babcock is about to preside over a cutthroat autumn culling. Let’s assume the top three lines go like so (which isn’t exactly a safe assumption in Toronto’s nothing-for-free culture): Let’s say Matthews centres Nylander and Zach Hyman; Tyler Bozak plays between Marner and James van Riemsdyk; and Nazem Kadri draws Patrick Marleau and Connor Brown.
That leaves 37-year-old Dominic Moore as the fourth-line centre, although it wouldn’t be a surprise if he’s pushed by Miro Aaltonen, the lively Finn signed as a free agent from the KHL. And given Moore is on a one-year, $1-million deal, he’s not exactly entrenched.
That also leaves Matt Martin and Leo Komarov as fourth-line wingers, possibly. But too many other possibilities exist for Martin and Komarov — or any winger, really — to get comfortable.
Maybe Kasperi Kapanen, the 21-year-old speedster who played in all six playoff games last spring, performs at a level too high to deny. Maybe Nikita Soshnikov, 23, shows continued progress and makes it difficult to cut him loose. Maybe Josh Leivo, the 24-year-old sniper who’ll need to clear waivers if he’s sent down, pots a bevy of pre-season goals to make the brain trust rethink his future.
Whatever, Babcock figures the deserving will get their due in the end.
“The right people always end up on the team, though sometimes they don’t end up on the team right away,” Babcock said.
You can make a case the Maple Leafs still don’t have the right guys on the blue line — that long-sought No. 1 defenceman wasn’t acquired in the off-season. But they’ve got enough depth to make the battle for jobs interesting.
As much as Morgan Rielly, Jake Gardiner, Nikita Zaitsev and Ron Hainsey look like locks in the top four, the third pairing is up for grabs. Martin Marincin and Connor Carrick are incumbent candidates. Swedish-league signees Calle Rosen and Andreas Borgman were brought here to knock on the door. And if anyone’s taking things lightly, the presence of Roman Polak — the zero-nonsense Czech who once took a puck through the cheek and barely flinched — ought to keep it honest.
Not that anyone in a Leafs sweater is being currently accused of cheating the game. There’s something about the way this team has been doing business in the Babcock era that has taken all those not-so-longago concerns about Toronto-based entitlement and cast them aside. Even Nazem Kadri, who glided through those bad old days and whose contract is guaranteed through 2022, impressed the coach with his off-season regimen.
“The first thing he did is he got in shape,” Babcock said. “(He had) the best summer since I’ve known him, for sure.”
Which puts him firmly in the majority.
“It’s pretty evident that lots of guys got to work after we lost out,” said the coach. “What I like about our group — a lot of guys have put in the work.”
Which means they’ll be ready to begin carving out their niche come Friday, when the real work actually begins.