Gardiner toughs it out, year after year
TORONTO — Good Jake. Bad Jake. Upside Jake. Downside Jake. Hardly an ever in-between Jake.
You love him much of the time. You hate him some of the time. Like when he appears to lose his marbles on the ice. Or when he waves his stick ineffectively at an opponent surging into the offensive zone. Or when he turns away to avoid a bodycheck.
He is one of the longest-tenured Toronto Maple Leafs at 490 games, as of the 2018-19 opener, one more than Nazem Kadri.
Oh, the horrors Jake Gardiner has seen, lo his seven years in the blue and white. The horrors he has directly contributed to, probably never so much as on April 25, 2018.
In the immediate aftermath, and on the bloody morning after, that was Sad Jake.
Wearing it, you know? A minus-5 on that dreadful night, in a first-round Game 7 loss to Boston. Crucified on social media. Flagellating himself in front of the media scrums. “One of the worst games of my life,” he said.
It seems a bit mean to revisit, almost six months later, as the new campaign opens with such brilliant optimism for the Leafs.
“It wasn’t easy to get over,” Gardiner admitted after the morning skate Wednesday, inside a dressing room of wall-to-wall reporters, the kind of crush not seen outside of post-season gatherings. Sure, it was historical rival Montreal in town, the fannykicking boot on the other foot for a change, and the anticipation for a Leafs renaissance of giddy proportions.
“But you’ve got to get over it. It’s something I don’t even want to think about again. It’s a new season and I’m just looking forward to it.”
There has been endless babble about how the Leafs are just one stud defenceman short of being a genuine Stanley Cup contender, the ominous hole management didn’t fill in an off-season where the free-agent trinket was a honking shiny bauble by the name of John Tavares.
Of course, the team unwrapped Wednesday night against the Canadiens is likely not the team that will burst forth into the posttrade deadline playoffs next spring. So it’s difficult to assess the club’s strengths silhouetted against its perceived weaknesses. They will score gobs of goals, doubtless, with Tavares more than glittery compensation for the departed James van Riemsdyk. A bounty of riches has been handed over to coach Mike Babcock with which to do his thing.
The top blue-line pairings are unchanged, however, from the gang that couldn’t nurse a onegoal lead through those remaining 20 minutes of Game 7 at TD Garden, ultimately collapsing in a 7-4 heap. Morgan Rielly with Ron Hainsey, Gardiner with Nikita Zaitsev. We’ll have to see what Babcock settles on for the third duo, provisionally Travis Dermott and intriguing Russian Igor Ozhiganov. This isn’t your old man’s National Hockey League and a sturdy stay-athome defenceman may have less value, especially on a Leaf squad built around speed, skill and the quick-pass zone exit. In that sense, defence is a five-player responsibility in front of Frederik Andersen.
“I think we have a strong defence,” Gardiner insisted. “Strong enough. Defence is a team game. Our system is set up for that. We’ve got guys coming. Dermott’s a young guy but he’s been playing great. So yeah, I feel good about it.”
More so, naturally, if the Leafs get the Zaitsev of two years ago and not the guy who never quite rebounded between the ears after missing six weeks with a broken bone in his foot, off a fluky shot by Henrik Zetterberg.
“He looks really confident,” says Gardiner of his rearguard mate. “He’s always been really solid defensively, crossing guys up and taking space away. He makes all those plays, and now he’s got another Russian in the room to talk to.”
That speed game, Gardiner points out, “we’ve been doing it forever.” It’s second nature now.
“It just makes it easier with guys that can skate and move the puck well. For a defenceman, a big part of it is bringing the puck out and moving it to the forwards. When you’ve got guys with this kind of high speed, high skill, it’s only going to make it that much easier and better.”
But that doesn’t necessarily address back-end confusion, which afflicted the Leafs last year, or retrieving the puck under pressure. It must be noted that Gardiner gets into trouble when he has too much time to think the game, to second-guess himself, to overplot a shot.
That’s the Bad Jake and there’s the rub. Yet even amid the nowand-then, though not-as-often, yips that seize Gardiner, he put up 52 points last season (five goals, 47 assists), he hasn’t missed a game in two years, and he skated miles in 2017-18 (a clubhigh 22.33 minutes per game, 22.39 in the playoffs). And for many of those minutes he was on the ice against the opposition’s best players.
The deeper numbers are favourable: a 41 percentage on shots getting through, a positive Corsi rating of 50.7 per cent, starting in the defensive zone 50.1 per cent of the time; 103 shots blocked, 51 hits throw, 39 takeaways. But, ahem, 105 giveaways. Which, rightly or wrongly, is what most sticks in the craw of Leaf fans.
High risk, high reward is the Gardiner brand since he was obtained via trade from Anaheim by Toronto in February 2011. He’d never played a game for the Ducks.
In July 2014, the Minnesotaborn Gardiner was given a fiveyear contract extension and will draw $4.05 million U.S. this season. But he’s a pending free agent and, while he could reasonably demand $6 million per year on the next contract he signs, the Leafs have salary-cap pressures, hence the stalemate with holdout William Nylander.
For all the glittery pieces Toronto now boasts, Gardiner, 28, is among the survivors who helped get them to this point. He is, with Kadri, rather a repository of memory, if plenty of them the wincing kind.
“It definitely makes you appreciate winning more, going through those times where the city wasn’t happy, the players weren’t happy, nobody was content with the way things were going.
“At first, coming here, I didn’t know too much so I was just excited to be out there. But yeah, it was tough, those years. You kind of get into this mode where you get used to losing, almost. Now it’s the opposite, where you get used to winning, expecting to win every single night.
“You wake up a lot happier in the morning, that’s for sure.”