Leafs need some peer pressure
Someone must lay down law in the locker room
It was a happening, a scene, an event so improbable that Maple Leafs forward James van Riemsdyk put down a post-practice beverage and walked across the dressing room to size it up for himself.
Eyes did not deceive. There was Phil Kessel, the normally hermit-like, recalcitrant star of the club, happily camped by his stall, chatting with a small gathering of reporters. Kessel was not being held at knifepoint, as far as one could see. His means of egress were not being barricaded by team public relations staff. If this was a forced mingling — and insiders will tell you it was only a strongly-suggested first step in an image-reclamation project — it looked natural enough.
Van Riemsdyk leaned in a little, as if to take a snapshot.
“This should be your Christmas card,” van Riemsdyk said to Kessel.
Said Kessel to van Riemsdyk, smiling and shrugging a little: “I’ve got to start making some friends.”
As the Maple Leafs returned to work on Thursday, with their 82-game season at the halfway point and their team outside a playoff spot thanks to a slide that’s seen them lose 8 of 10, there were voices suggesting that a little less dressing-room friendliness might actually be in order. Never mind the harmless schmoozing with the media, which was more than welcome — the idea went that it might not hurt interactions between fellow Maple Leafs to be a little less chummy and a little bit more business-like.
Peter Horachek took over as interim head coach on Wednesday, and already he has said more than once that he’d like to see players hold each other accountable in lieu of constant coach-to-player harping. The best teams in the league, after all, rely heavily on self-policing when it comes to ensuring on-ice standards are upheld with due consistency.
But if peer pressure is a powerful thing, applying it can be easier said than done, especially if there aren’t sufficient alpha figures in the circle.
“It’s one of those parts of being a leader that isn’t necessarily always easy. It’s one of the tougher things to do,” said defenceman Cody Franson, who has worn an A for the club this season. “We’re all friends in here, and nobody wants to go up to a guy and tell him he’s got to figure it out, or he’s got to do this or do that.”
If hockey is often a mind-your-own-business kind of business, there are NHLers who think nothing of intervention.
When van Riemsdyk played for the Flyers, he said one of the dressingroom cops of note was Chris Pronger, the Hall of Fame-bound defenceman.
“I remember sitting next to him in the stall; if my stuff was over the line, I found my shoes in the hot tub a few times,” van Riemsdyk said.
Pronger did more than hand out the dressing-room equivalent of parking tickets. Like all solid overseers of hockey-related habits, he wasn’t above full-blown indictments of the work habits of teammates.
Horachek has called it “imperative” something similar happen in Leafland. The looming question, of course, is which players will spearhead enforcement.
It doesn’t have to be a one-man job, of course. But the captain, Dion Phaneuf, isn’t widely seen as up to the task, if only because his fourplus years with the C has resulted in a dressing room in need of selfpolicing. Kessel has obvious cred as the highest paid and highest-scoring Leaf, but he has shown no affinity for such things.
An obvious candidate for in-house policeman-in-chief would be Stephane Robidas, the 37-year-old defenceman who has been heralded as a natural leader and a coachworthy explainer of Xs and Os. Still, it’s difficult to preach when one’s own game has been relegated to the press box as a healthy scratch as often as his.
As van Riemsdyk said Thursday, thinking back to his days in a Flyers locker room ruled by Pronger and veteran defenceman Kimmo Timonen: “If (Pronger and Timonen) were just saying stuff and they weren’t going out there and living it on the ice, it doesn’t mean anything.”
Another Toronto name that comes to mind is Roman Polak. One of the team’s resident straight talkers, the defenceman has been publicly redflagging transgressions against on-ice common sense since mid-November, back when the Leafs were drilled 9-2 by the Predators.
In the wake of that loss Polak called out Toronto forwards for too often “blowing the zone” and “thinking offence before we even have the puck.”
This week he reiterated his stance that too many Leafs are more focused on getting points than playing the right way. But for all his candour with reporters, it’s been said that he isn’t often a vocal presence in the room. Perhaps it’s because he’s a non-star who’s new to the team this season.
“He’s a pretty quiet guy,” Robidas said of Polak. “He’s not a big rah-rah guy. But whenever he speaks, everybody respects him and everybody listens.”
A successful team needs at least a few citizens of that sort; it’s widely accepted that a smidgen of peer-topeer truth is worth more than piles upon piles of coach-spoken gospel.
With Horachek reciting a new script that’s encouraging players to take “ownership” of the operation, the optimists among the group held out hope that the right voices would emerge; that the seeds of productive transformation were being planted in the Leafs dressing room.
But as Robidas cautioned, on a day Kessel smiled and laughed with reporters: “It’s like anything else. It’s not going to change overnight.”