HBO could make Leafs hockey a thing of beauty

But it might also showcase the stress fractures in a flawed franchise

If you work for HBO, you’d rather be associated with Game of Thrones than almost anything else, right? Drama and blood, fire and death, betrayals galore. Things happen on Game of Thrones — horrible things, terrible things, things that are agony for the main characters, and that can often be tough to watch. It can be a difficult thing to be emotionally attached to.

This is approximately what HBO 24/7 may yet resemble for Toronto Maple Leafs fans, as it arrives Wednesday to spend four weeks inside the asylum. We are about to find out so much about the Leafs. First, there’s the fact that they started a brutal gauntlet of games Tuesday night by playing San Jose, and had already begun to slide down the muddy bank. The Leafs are in trouble. It could get much worse. And hello, HBO.

“Guys are definitely more excited than not, because it’s one of the best networks to showcase what NHL players do, and everything it takes for us to put in, on a day-today basis, what it takes to be professionals,” Leafs defenceman Mark Fraser said Tuesday morning. “I was impressed by how accurate it was in portraying the games, and what it’s like to be an NHLer, good and bad. You see the pressures on guys, and how coaches can get on guys.”

And in there you find the real drama, the stress points of the league — Bruce Boudreau in the Washington Capitals locker-room spilling his desperate anger out at a floundering team, that sort of thing.

The Detroit Red Wings have had their challenges this season, but the Red Wings are a solid thing.

The old white cinder block walls of Joe Louis Arena will be gorgeous, and Mike Babcock’s voice will evoke small arenas on a winter night on the Prairie, and HBO will find stories in the organization that feels as constant as the sunrise.

But the Leafs are so full of storylines that HBO will have trouble deciding where to go. There are the struggles of big free-agent signing David Clarkson, who entered Tuesday night with five points in 17 games, stuck on the third line. There is the role of the fighters Toronto insists on carrying around. There is the opacity of Phil Kessel, the beatific smile of James Reimer even when he’s thrown in against machines like the Sharks, the contradictions of Nazem Kadri — who missed Tuesday night’s game due to a death in the family — and the pressures of playing with the weight of this franchise sewn into the shoulder pads.

Then, of course, there is the slender chance that HBO will delve into the calculus of the so-called advanced stats debate that has enveloped the Leafs all season. They allow so many more shot attempts than they produce, and there is a strong correlation between that and quality teams. In the lockout-shortened campaign the Leafs defied this convention, so this season became a sort of referendum. And then, of course, they opened the season 6-1.

Since then, though, the math has gone against them, and now HBO has arrived just as November ended. The Leafs won twice in regulation in November, went 1-11 against Buffalo, and 4-6-3 overall. Heading into Tuesday, they were 8-9-3 since that great start, and unlike the 48-game sprint last season, there is a long way left to skate. San Jose, then Dallas, at Ottawa, Boston, the L.A. Kings, at St. Louis, Chicago, at Pittsburgh, and then a lesser stretch heading up to the Winter Classic in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Jan. 1.

As it happens, we will see a peek behind the curtain. Hockey players are so relentlessly conditioned to be cautious in this country, because they can become human starting guns if they actually say what they think. HBO has a way of opening them up, and of telling us who they actually are. In more ways than one.

“One of the best parts, I think, wasn’t so much behind the scenes, but the actual games,” Fraser said. “The intensity that’s shown, because you don’t get to actually see it that often from the shots from above, or on a TV screen, it can seem like it’s a slow pace, and it definitely isn’t.”

Nobody makes hockey look quite the way HBO does. The way their cameras take you down to the ice, the way the collisions sound like car crashes, the way the speed is almost blinding when you’re used to seeing it from high camera angles, the way you can almost feel the game,

That, in the end, could become one of HBO’s great accomplishments. They could make Maple Leafs hockey beautiful to watch.