TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF
Toronto’s beloved hockey team may be latest to end drought
TORONTO — I have taken up this cause before, and will do so for as long as it is necessary for the world to be able to celebrate what would be one of the greatest sports celebrations of all time.
You think Boston went bananas for the Red Sox when they ditched that 86-year curse in 2004? Think Chicago went crazy over the Cubbies ending 108 years of frustration two years ago? Think Philly went fanatical over the Iggles finally winning a Super Bowl for the first time last February?
Those were cocktail parties compared to what will happen if — and when — the Maple Leafs win their 14th Stanley Cup. They would party over that anyway, because hockey (as you may know) is fairly important here in the True North (strong and free).
But when you consider the Leafs won their 13th Cup in 1967…
And that that’s now 51 years in the past…
“I look forward to writing that whenever it happens,” Bruce Arthur, the splendid sports columnist for the Toronto Star, told me the other day, when he and the rest of his city took a breather from the looming playoff anxieties to come to celebrate the Blue Jays on Opening Day. “Although I’m not sure that I’d know exactly what to do.”
Look, it’s likely you won’t have a dog in the Stanley Cup hunt in the weeks to come (unless you’re the Devils, and even if you get some playoff run you have a vested interest in this, too; I’ll explain soon). But if you’re a hockey fan, you’re still going to watch the Cup playoffs because they’re one of the greatest things going in sports right now. And even if you’re a casual fan, they can be awfully awesome.
Anyway, I have five handy reasons why you should adopt the Leafs this year:
1. They’re a team in the true sense of the word, exactly the kind of team we would embrace. As Arthur says: “They can absolutely win the Cup. And can absolutely lose in the first round.” The Leafs have 101 points heading into Saturday, third-most in the East, sixthmost in the NHL. They are an exciting team that doesn’t have a dominant star (their leading scorer, Mitchell Marner, is 31st in the league in points and their top goalie, Frederik Andersen, is just 16th in save percentage).
2. Lou Lamoriello. This is where Devils fans come in, because this should be their secondary team if the Devils either fail to get in or get knocked out early. What Lamoriello did in Jersey remains one of the amazing achievements in all of pro sports. If he ends the Leafs’ drought as their GM, too? They should rename the Hockey Hall of Fame (located right on Yonge Street, downtown) after him.
3. The only comparable thing in American sports would be if the Yankees had a 51-year drought (and remember how it felt like our world was topsy-turvy when the Yankees went eighteen whole years between titles from 1978-96. And you could argue the Leafs’ skid is even worse because hockey just means more here than any individual sport does in New York (and, besides, the Mets won a title in the middle of that Yankees drought, so it wasn’t as if the whole sport of baseball disappeared in our city).
4. The Good Old Hockey Game. It’s the best game you can name. And the best game you can name, is the good old hockey game. Which is so ridiculously catchy a song that if you hear it once you never stop hearing it. And they play it at every Leafs game. At least once. And if you’re lucky they’ll play it at a Jays game, too.
5. The last time the Leafs won a Cup, ’67, was the last year there were just six teams in the NHL. It doubled in size the next year, sits at 30 now, and though they haven’t won a Cup themselves since 1993, it’s assumed as gospel that the Montreal Canadiens are the league’s standard bearer. But when the Leafs won in ’67, they led the Canadiens in Cups, 13-12. Montreal has added thirteen since. Even the Dodgers and Red Sox didn’t absorb that many indignities as chief rivals to the Yankees through the years. It’s time.