HE’S HERE TO STAY
Rookie Mitch Marner has already earned full-time role with Leafs.
When the Maple Leafs season began, there was a school of thought that figured Mitch Marner wouldn’t make it in the NHL beyond October. Nine games as a pro and he’d be back to junior, where 19-year-olds who weigh 170 pounds belong.
So much for that theory. There’s a lot we don’t know about these intriguing Maple Leafs. Will Frederik Andersen, the previously lost-at-sea goaltender who put in a find performance in Thursday’s 3-2 win over the Florida Panthers, live up to his five-year contract? Will the Leafs, for all their defensive challenges, stay in the playoff hunt long enough to be taken seriously? On those and so many questions, the jury’s out.
But one thing seems beyond certain: Marner isn’t going back to junior after a nine-game audition. To be clear, he probably wasn’t going back before Thursday’s brilliant performance, wherein he set up all three Toronto goals to finally tack headline-grabbing numbers beside his growing reputation as a chance-creating, offence-driving machine. But now that Marner has six points in his first seven games as a pro, it’s a lock that, barring calamity, he has already played his final junior-hockey game.
The kid is on the team, period. Heck, on Thursday night he was the best player on the team for most of three periods.
“I wasn’t waiting for nine games, or even looking at that, to be honest with you,” Leafs head coach Mike Babcock said before Thursday’s game, speaking of Marner’s situation. “But Lou and I haven’t talked about that yet.”
Not that it hadn’t been talked about. The thinking in some corners went that for all Marner’s undeniable talent — and he won virtually every award available to a junior a season ago — he wouldn’t stand up well to the grind of the NHL trenches. And given the rules surrounding 19-year-old NHLers who emerge from the Canadian Hockey League, there was a possibility he’d last precisely nine games as a Maple Leaf in 2016-17. The American Hockey League, a possibly attractive middle ground, isn’t even a long-term option in Marner’s case thanks to an agreement between the NHL and CHL.
But Thursday night’s performance made the ins and outs of those technicalities seem irrelevant to Marner’s circumstance. A year after dominating Canada’s junior ranks, there were more than a few moments Thursday when he dominated in the world’s best league.
Marner set up Toronto’s first goal to punctuate a tireless, 54-second shift near the first period’s conclusion wherein he managed a spinning shot on goal and forced a turnover before he fed Nikita Zaitsev for a shot that was deflected past Roberto Luongo by Tyler Bozak.
Marner set up the second goal, to make it 2-2, with a nifty bit of footwork, controlling the puck with his right skate as he wheeled below the right dot and laid a perfect pass to James van Riemsdyk.
But the third goal was the next-level jaw-dropper. Recovering a tipped puck around the right faceoff dot as the Leafs made a rush, Marner hit Bozak with a cross-crease pass that Bozak converted for an easy tap-in.
It was no big deal, except that Marner threaded the pass as though he had eyes in the back of his helmet. Facing away from his intended target, the puck arrived on the tape as if directed by Jedi mind trick or GPS. Not that the teammates who’ve seen such magic in practice were surprised.
“I was kind of expecting it,” Bozak said.
Said van Riemsdyk: “He has that ability to know where guys are without necessarily seeing them.”
Marner, for his part, said he took a glance over his shoulder before he made the pass to size up its parameters, shrugging off the play as matter of fact.
“It’s the NHL. But at the same time, it’s nothing new,” he said. “You’ve grown up playing this game.”
Babcock had raved about Marner’s rare skill set before the game: “If you’re Bozak or van Riemsdyk, you know you’re getting two or three good looks a game out of the kid. And he blocks shots, plays good defensively, is a good hockey player.”
That last part is the astonishing thing. For all his delivery-on-demand wizardry, Marner’s commitment to a workmanlike to-do list in the defensive zone is also real. Heading into Thursday, Marner led Toronto’s forwards with nine blocked shots.
“Turnovers can cause a lot of mistakes for the other team, and a lot of opportunities for us,” Marner said.
Asked last week about Babcock’s comparisons between this Maple Leafs team and the 2009 Chicago Blackhawks — you know, the one led by 20-year-old Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane that won the Stanley Cup in 2010 — Marner barely blushed at the high praise.
“We’re young, but we’re learning a lot . . . It’s just going to keep getting better and better,” he said Saturday.
Thursday proved him prescient enough. And while there’s a long way to go, Marner figures the extensive schedule of today’s pre-NHLers has prepared him and his young teammates for the 82-game run.
“I feel like we’re not going to get tired throughout the year. We’ve got a lot of young legs, and we’re going to take care of each other, and take care of ourselves,” Marner said last week. “I think we can go for a while.”
A while, and certainly well beyond nine games.