Hoping old dogs will share their tricks
They’ve been saying it for years now: The NHL is getting younger.
“This is a young man’s league,” Patrick Kane, now 31, was saying a couple of years ago, marvelling at the influx of fellow hockey prodigies a decade his junior.
And ever since Toronto watched a 19-year-old phenom named Auston Matthews score four goals in his first NHL game, the Maple Leafs have occupied the vanguard of that shift — a team headlined by fresh-faced whiz kids gifted with potential as vast as their contracts.
For Toronto hockey fans of a certain age, the relative youth of the local squad, as much as it was tantalizing in its possibility, was also a historic departure. This is a franchise, after all, whose best moments have often arrived thanks to the enlightened guidance of veteran wisdom.
Never mind that old story about the Leafs winning their most recent Stanley Cup in 1967 with 42-year-old Johnny Bower playing goal for a geriatric team whose average age landed around 30. Let’s consider more recent history. The last time the Leafs won so much as a playoff series, in 2004, the dressing room featured, on some nights, as many as 15 players over the age of 30. Stark contrast, then, that on the most recent occasion that the Leafs made the actual playoffs, in 2019, they had two veterans aged 30-plus — Patrick Marleau and Ron Hainsey. And, of course, they lost.
But time marches on. Matthews turned 23 last month. Team president Brendan Shanahan recently acknowledged that his team has “taken a step back in the past couple of years.” With that in mind, the ongoing NHL off-season has seen the Leafs make a decidedly retro shift of sorts. Thanks to the addition of a handful of 30-something free agents — among them defencemen T.J. Brodie and Zach Bogosian, both 30, and forward Wayne Simmonds, 32 — next season’s version of the Maple Leafs will look decidedly more mature than various recent incarnations.
Team captain John Tavares turned 30 last month. Stalwart defender Jake Muzzin and No. 1 goaltender Frederik Andersen are both 31. Add Jason Spezza, the 37-year-old father of four known around the dressing room as “Vintage,” and that’s seven Leafs aged 30-plus on the roster, eight if you like the odds of recently signed 31-year-old depth goaltender Aaron Dell beating out 28-year-old Jack Campbell for the role of Andersen’s backup.
If the club is successful in its long-time pursuit of free-agent centreman Joe Thornton, a literal greybeard at a debatably viable 41 years of age, it’ll only emphasize the franchise’s demographic transformation. Recently known as one of the youngest teams in the NHL, next season it figures to be something decidedly more experienced.
Whether that’s good or bad will be judged by on-ice results. What’s undeniable is that the approach is cribbing a successful model. Take note that the Tampa Bay Lightning recently won the Stanley Cup with 10 players age 30 or older logging at least one playoff game. The year before, when the Lightning were eliminated in a historic first-round sweep, they employed three such 30-and-over veterans. That’s not to say the influx of older guys was the ultimate difference. Tampa Bay’s leading playoff goal scorer, Brayden Point, is 24 years old. Conn Smythe Trophy winner Victor Hedman won’t turn 30 until December. But the influx of the older guys was widely credited with providing the Lightning with a calmer, steadier comportment en route to its longsought title.
To which historic figures in Maple Leafs history might say: Well, duh.
“It’s experienced guys that bring you a long way,” Pat Burns, the late coach of the famed 1993 Leafs that came within a game of the Stanley
Cup final, once said. “They know how to handle the day-in and day-out grind of the season and the playoffs.”
That’s a sentiment with which Pat Quinn, the alsodeparted bench boss of the 2003-04 team that beat Ottawa in the first round, would surely concur.
“I don’t have a problem with an older team,” Quinn said in 2003. “These guys look after themselves so well, nowadays … If you have athletes that have established a high level, they don’t fall off that far, until they’re ready to (retire).”
Shifts in leaguewide rostermakeup philosophy have happened through the ages. When the Edmonton Oilers dominated the 1980s with a team of young studs, there were NHL GMs who tried to find their own versions of a young Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier and Paul Coffey. And now that Tampa has found a longsought championship after bolstering its 30-plus contingent — this after St. Louis won a championship with seven players age 30 or older logging playoff minutes — it only makes sense that the Leafs are trampling a similar path.
It’s certainly in the organizational DNA. In the days before the salary cap arrived in 200506, Toronto often favoured building its teams around the availability of veteran free agents.
It was an approach that brought some playoff success, albeit not the ultimate kind.
“You can’t tell the best hockey fans in North America, ‘Hey, we’re young and we’re going to miss the playoffs but things will be better down the road,’ ” former Leafs GM Cliff Fletcher said in 2003.
What does Shanahan tell the best hockey fans in North America given that, since he took over in 2014, the team has yet to win so much as a playoff round? Whenever next season rolls around, he’s sure to tell them that his management team has made real changes, that it’s addressed deficiencies in the areas of “grit and work ethic,” which Shanahan pinpointed as weak spots following its play-in round loss. And it’ll also come up that the Leafs, not long ago a showcase of fresh-from-the-draft promise, have become considerably older.
Age, of course, is simply a number. As Darcy Tucker, the beloved agitator on that 200304 Leafs team, once said, “Old is just a state of mind. (Age) doesn’t matter. You’re human, I’m human. Game’s played the same as it was then. Puck, ice, boards, nets. At crunch time, I think the most reliable guys are your veterans.”
Next year’s Leafs aren’t expecting their oldest players to be their best ones. But clearly there’s a hope they’ll be of influence. Tavares has said that for his club to succeed “the will to win has to burn a little hotter.” Considering that only Muzzin and Bogosian own Cup rings — that the likes of Simmonds and Spezza, in particular, are here chasing a latecareer Cup dream — Shanahan can hope an upping of the average dressing-room age will correspond with a discernible spike in the collective internal fire.