Leafs need stars to be stars when it counts
Matthews, Marner must be better in playoffs
Dave Keon was 22 years old when he won his first Stanley Cup and had just passed his 27th birthday when he led the Toronto Maple Leafs to their fourth championship.
The world was so different then, the NHL was a tiny sixteam league: the Leafs, back then, were best known as the team you didn’t want to play in the playoffs, no matter where they finished in the regular season.
Keon began a different kind of parade as a Leaf. He was a centre who passed the baton to Norm Ullman, who passed it to Darryl Sittler, then to Doug Gilmour and then Mats Sundin. A great list of Toronto centremen: All of them in the Hockey Hall of Fame, only Keon a champion in this city.
Auston Matthews just turned 24 years old and is entering his sixth season with the Maple Leafs. By this age, Keon had carried the Cup three times and as Jean Béliveau once said he was the centre you never wanted to play against. Sittler took the Leafs to the league semifinals, so did Gilmour, so did Sundin, among them numerous times.
Matthews, who may be the most talented of them all, who should wind up scoring more goals than any of that list of hall of famers, has yet to play for a Leafs team that has made its way to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
In Keon’s best days, when you won two rounds, you won the Cup. The Leafs won four times with Keon as their No. 1 centre and Frank Mahovlich as their No. 1 winger. This team should not be thinking Stanley Cup as this season begins, led by Matthews at centre and Mitch Marner the first all-star firstteam winger since Mahovlich. They should be thinking — come April — about winning a playoff round.
About a start of some kind. About defining more about their careers than they have currently shown.
One indisputable fact in hockey: You can’t win the Cup if you don’t win a round in the playoffs. And it doesn’t matter much now as this season is set to begin whether this team is capable of winning a Cup or not — what matters is taking a step they haven’t taken before.
And obviously, there is pressure on the young superstars, starting with Matthews and Marner, with the paradoxical William Nylander not far behind them, to find a place, a game, a style, that will take them in the direction Keon and Mahovlich once took this franchise so many years ago.
This season begins, as all seasons do, with questions. And maybe the first question circles around the coach, Sheldon Keefe. This is essentially his third year on the job, although one of those years was divided by a pandemic and another was shortened. This is his first full season as coach, with a full training camp, with summer training, with planning, with swearing his way through the Maple Leafs’ documentary series, All or Nothing.
But make no mistake: This is Keefe’s all or nothing, make-it-or-break-it season as Maple Leafs coach. He has managed some really fine work in the regular season won-and-lost department and more specifically in turning the Leafs into a team that could play in three zones and defend itself without appearing exposed. They took that step last year only to fail when they were inches away from knocking the Montreal Canadiens out in the first round of the playoffs.
Keefe has coached in two playoff series to date. In the first one, the Leafs appeared unprepared to beat the Columbus Blue Jackets. Last season, they had the Canadiens on the ropes and ended up with the rope around their own necks, losing the final three games of the series. And in two of those games, they played nervous, almost listless hockey.
If the Leafs lose in the first round again this season — assuming they make the playoffs in the tough Atlantic Division — they can’t maintain the same coach after that. The pressure on this team, the pressure on this coach, with playoff assumption, will truly start in April. Rarely has a Leaf season began with so many thinking mainly about how it will end.
Matthews and Marner are in different situations. There is pressure on them the way there is pressure on anyone playing high-level professional sports. But their giantsized contracts guarantee enormous money no matter where the Leafs end up this season. Almost certainly, barring injury, they will begin the season with the Leafs — if Matthews can play on opening night — they will play against each other in the Olympic Games of China in February, and they will return in time for the push to the playoffs.
You win, as Tampa Bay has the past two seasons, when your superstars play like superstars. The Lightning were led by Nikita Kucherov and Brayden Point in playoff scoring, two years in a row. There is every possibility Matthews will lead the NHL in goal scoring again — something Keon, Ullman, Sittler, Gilmour, Sundin, never did as Leafs. And there is every possibility that Marner will be right around the 100-point mark, something no Leafs winger has ever done.
And not since the Leafs had Gilmour and Dave Andreychuk or Sittler playing alongside Lanny Mcdonald have they had a 1-2 combination like they have right now. So on the one hand, you have to appreciate what Matthews and Marner bring from a historical point of view. They are exceptional players.
Now, like the coach, they need to be exceptional when it matters most. Bryan Trottier and Mike Bossy led the New York Islanders to four Stanley Cups. Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier did the same in Edmonton with Messier winning one more in Alberta after Gretzky was traded. The combinations don’t always play together: Jonathan Toews didn’t usually play with Patrick Kane in Chicago. Steve Yzerman and Sergei Fedorov didn’t play together in Detroit.
But all of them mattered exponentially when the playoffs began. In Toronto, where both cynicism and expectations are near an alltime high, advancing to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs would represent victory of some kind in this city.
The Leafs had no real playoff success with Frederik Andersen in goal and Zach Hyman playing up and down the lineup. The Leafs now begin a season with some doubts about their goaltending and depth on the wing.
Jack Campbell was sensational last season, eight years after he was supposed to become the next great NHL goalie. Maybe, like Tim Thomas before him, like Devan Dubnyk, he has found his way later in his career. He turns 30 in January. Maybe last season was the new beginning for Campbell. If that’s the case, the Leafs will be fine in goal.
Otherwise, in a shared situation with Petr Mrazek, who is also turning 30 and has never been considered great, this could be a 1 and 1a situation — the “a” being for average. Kyle Dubas, the general manager, is not a kid anymore. His Boy Wonder days are over. He’s now a veteran on the job, been there, done that, hired the largest front office in the National Hockey League, and made a long series of impressive moves — salaries aside — that should have made the Leafs better.
He brought in Campbell and Mrazek inexpensively. He brought in TJ Brodie and Jake Muzzin on defence while being party to the development of Justin Holl and Rasmus Sandin. He signed free agent John Tavares, which was a great move then, still in question now. He brought in David Kampf, Nick Ritchie, Ondrej Kase, Michael Bunting this season to deepen his club in a variety of ways.
Keefe is his coach. These are his players. This should be his time.
The addition of Kampf is particularly notable when you go back to last season’s playoffs. Phillip Danault scored five goals for Montreal in the regular season, one in 22 playoff games, and yet was a significant part of the Canadiens’ run to the Stanley Cup. Kampf scored one goal in Chicago last year, eight the year before. Danault did first-round damage against the Leafs and they came to a post-season conclusion that they needed their own shutdown centre. Kampf becomes the Leafs’ Danault — or at least they want him to be that.
That strengthens the lineup: That makes them harder to play against.
And if one of Ritchie, Kase or Bunting — all of whom have shown partial good signs in the past — can contribute, and if someone can convince Pierre Engvall that he is actually bigger and faster and stronger than almost everyone he plays against, there are some possibilities here that were missing in the past.
It will start, though, and finish with what Matthews and Marner, and to a lesser extent Tavares and Nylander, can contribute.
The Leafs never had a Big Four when they last won Stanley Cups. Or were even Cup contenders. They had contributions up and down the lineup. They had veterans who understood. They had kids like Keon and Mahovlich with extreme talent maybe even exceeded by what Matthews and Marner bring.
That’s the tease of this Maple Leafs team: Rarely have they been this great, rarely been this exasperating. And now, just seven months to figure out who and what they might be.