ADIEU MARLEAU
Lure of playing in Canada seems to have been the deciding factor FRANCHISE ICON HEADED TO TORONTO AFTER 19 SEASONS
We didn’t know how the partnership would end. But not many people figured it would be like this, exactly.
Patrick Marleau and Joe Thornton were partners in winning bigly with the Sharks for the past dozen seasons, even if they never won it all. But working with each other, on or off the same line but almost always on the power play together, they became the No. 1 and No. 2 scorers in franchise history. That will always be their legacy.
But now half the legacy is gone. With both Marleau and Thornton becoming unrestricted free agents
this weekend, most speculation was that they would either both leave or both stay with the Sharks. My gut feeling was that they would go. It turned out my gut was 50 percent correct. Thornton agreed to a one-year contract for $8 million in total compensation to remain a Shark. Marleau accepted a three-year offer from the Toronto Maple Leafs that’s worth an average of $6.25 million per season.
You can see why each man made the decision he did. It will still be weird as teal hell to watch the beloved Los Tiburones next season and not see No. 12 skating out of the Shark head before every game at SAP Center as the last player to hit the ice, which was Marleau’s tradition. He did that because it’s what Mario Lemieux, one of Marleau’s role models, did with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
In the back of his head, Marleau must have always thought he might play his entire career in San Jose as Lemieux did in Pittsburgh. He must have been thinking about that all last week as he “wore out a few carpets” pondering the options he received from other teams. But in the end, Marleau’s he-played-for-only-one-team thoughts were chased across the border to Canada because . . . well, because it was Canada and Marleau is Canadian.
Yes, the money was better. The term was better. But the tug of finishing his career in his native land, for the man who has coached Marleau twice in the Olympics — Mike Babcock— was as much a factor in the choice as anything else.
That’s not what Marleau said exactly in a brief conference call following his signing. Close enough, though. Here were the third and fourth sentences out of his mouth while answering a generic question about his reasoning for taking the Toronto deal: “It’s definitely an honor to be able to call myself a Maple Leaf. Obviously, being a Canadian player, a Canadian-born player, this decision took me quite a while to come to but I’ve made it.”
Once, strictly on a hunch from my observations, I ran the numbers and discovered that Marleau scored fractionally more often against Canadian NHL teams than he did against American NHL teams. My unscientific conclusion was that when he knew more Canadian eyeballs were watching, he found more giddyup in his game. Well, now he will have more eyeballs watching him than any other team in English-speaking Canada.
The trade-off, of course, is that Marleau is going to be under much more scrutiny under the relentless media hockey coverage, which may find his Mr. Climate-Control personality— never too up or down — to be a sign of having no fire when he goes through one of his scoring lulls. At times, that personality could frustrate his coaches in San Jose, although I always took it as professionalism to the extreme and maybe too far to the extreme.
My wish is that Marleau will do fabulously as a Maple Leaf because he gave the Sharks so many seasons of memories while being an exemplary community contributor. He and his wife, a South Bay native, established a year-round home here with their four sons. But it appears from Marleau’s remarks that he will be moving his family to Toronto for the winter. Man, he must really love Ontario province.
The bigger question, I suppose, is why Thornton is staying if Marleau goes. The answer may be the same, though — Thornton simply wants to play where he wants to play. And he has learned to love San Jose. Doug Wilson, the Sharks’ general manager, sticks to his guns when it comes to the privacy of negotiations. But it appears this is how it played out according to various reliable reports:
• Mindful of a potential salary-cap squeeze in 2018-19 and 2019-20, Wilson offered Marleau a two-year deal worth around $10 million to stay with the Sharks. Wilson offered a one-year deal to Thornton, coming off knee surgery, worth $6.75 million.
• Thornton was willing to risk the lack of security with a one-year deal and was also willing to take that roughly $6.75 million as long as Marleau re-signed with the Sharks . . . while Wilson promised Thornton that if Marleau left, Thornton’s compensation would increase.
• Marleau and Thornton were in contact frequently over the weekend and when Marleau finally made his choice, Thornton’s total package jumped up to $8 million with a $1.25 million bonus, which is why the official Jumbo signing was not announced until after Marleau’s decision.
• Basically, Thornton was gambling that the Sharks can make one more Stanley Cup run this season and he can contribute greatly to it. Marleau decided that the Maple Leafs have a better chance to win the Cup in the next three years than the Sharks do in the next two seasons.
Meanwhile, feel free to be melancholy. The Sharks may never see a partnership like Marleau-Thornton again. They were the franchise’s Lennon-McCartney. And the music was pretty damn special.