Learning to roll without punches

No muscle. No heavyweights, or even middleweights. No toughness or belligerence, at least not in the traditional hockey sense.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are your 2018-19 Toronto Maple Leafs. Or, perhaps, your Toronto Lady Byngs.

And, by the way, more than a few hockey people out there think these guys have a decent shot at winning the Stanley Cup.

Remember the old Charles Atlas cartoon advertisement dubbed “The Insult That Made A Man Out of Mac?” Young man gets sand kicked in his face at the beach, goes on an Atlas bodybuilding program and is never bullied again?

The Leafs are that ad, except they start as the muscle-bound fellow and end up as the skinny guy at the beginning.

Last year, only three teams — Carolina, Las Vegas and Columbus — took fewer penalties than Mike Babcock’s Leafs, and apparently that was still too many. Of the 570 penalty minutes incurred by the Leafs, 127 of those minutes (22 per cent) were taken by

three players: Matt Martin, Roman Polak and Leo Komarov. All of whom are gone. They’ve been replaced by John Tavares (26 penalty minutes last season) and possibly Tyler Ennis (12 minutes). Andreas Johnsson may make the roster, and he had 53 minutes with the AHL Marlies last season, but only two penalty minutes in 15 NHL games with the Leafs. Kasperi Kapanen took only 16 penalty minutes in 64 games last season split between the Leafs and Marlies.

Igor Ozhiganov, the KHL refugee? He might make the team, but it won’t be for muscle. He took 12 penalty minutes last year.

You get the picture. A process that began when Brendan Shanahan arrived in 2014, right around the time the entire league started to get faster and faster and hockey enforcers started on their final path to extinction, has now produced the least truculent Leafs team in the history of the franchise. A franchise that, for decades, believed if you couldn’t beat ’em in the alley you’d never beat ’em on the ice, now is all about passive resistance.

Given that Brian Burke ran the team from the fall of 2008 to the winter of 2013 and positioned the Leafs as the toughest team in the league with the most fighting majors, this is an extraordinary turnaround in the club’s philosophy. As one agent noted last year when discussing the Leafs’ low injury rate, “they don’t hit you and they don’t get hit.” They also don’t fight, and don’t do much of anything that draws the attention of the referees.

As an organization, the Leafs haven’t valued muscle, or belligerence, since they drafted junior enforcer Jamie Devane in 2009, or since taking Brad Ross and his 203 penalty minutes in the second round back in 2010. They haven’t really put a premium on size since taking Frederik Gauthier in the first round in 2013.

Martin (six fights last year) may end up being the last true enforcer to play for the team, extraordinary for a franchise with a long history of valuing elite scrappers such as Tiger Williams, Tie Domi, Ken Baumgartner, Colton Orr, Gary Roberts, Shayne Corson, Wendel Clark, Wade Belak and Kris King.

The question that will be asked often this season is whether an NHL team can win (or survive) this way. By going this light. Or whether a team without a single individual capable of dropping the gloves and taking on the toughest player on the other team, or clearing the front of the net with extreme prejudice, will inevitably get pushed around.

The Washington Capitals, lest we forget, won the Cup last year and they were the sixthmost penalized team in the league. They had Tom Wilson and his 187 minutes and various run-ins with the law, and rock-ribbed Brooks Orpik on the back end. The Leafs don’t have a player like Wilson or Orpik. Can they survive in the NHL jungle that way?

Of course, the NHL as a whole has been going this way for some time. A decade ago, there were 52 players in the NHL who had 100 or more penalty minutes. Last season, there were only seven such players.

A decade ago, there was an average of .54 fights per game, and almost 39 per cent of NHL games had at least one. Last year, those numbers had shrivelled to .22 per game, and 18 per cent of games with at least one fight.

The belief that there was enormous value in physically intimidating play, even if it resulted in penalties, is clearly dying. The Leafs are clearly part of this wave, not swimming against the current.

Lou Lamoriello, general manager under Shanahan until last summer, still liked having a handy pair of fists around. But Kyle Dubas, the new GM, seems to have little or no use for such players.

Dubas impressed Shanahan enough with his philosophies on the game that he was one of Shanahan’s first hires with the Leafs, and Shanahan picked Dubas ahead of Lamoriello and Mark Hunter last summer to run the team.

Shanahan, with 2,489 regularseason penalty minutes and 96 fighting majors during his career, was no pussycat. But clearly he’s flexible enough in his thinking to see that the elements that were necessary on a winning team when he played may not be nearly as crucial now. He averaged 113 penalty minutes a season during his long career, and is now the president of an NHL team that may not have a single player accumulate 50 minutes this season.

A decade after the Leafs looked like they wanted to put together a team that Ogie Oglethorpe could love, these are now the Leafs that Mahatma Gandhi could endorse.

Now we’ll see if they can win this way.