Here’s Johnny!
Local boy who dreamed of playing for the Leafs comes home for ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity
The Toronto Maple Leafs are the biggest hockey franchise in the world in every way but accomplishment; they are loved despite themselves, most of all.
Boys grow up dreaming of playing for the Leafs, but the best ones almost never do. Wayne Gretzky never came home. Eric Lindros did, but only after he had been broken. Steven Stamkos wondered: he sat down, listened to the pitch and fled back to Florida as fast as he could.
On Sunday, John Tavares left the vagabond semi-obscurity of the New York Islanders to sign a seven-year, $77-million (U.S.) deal to play in Toronto. Star players almost never leave on their own in the NHL and Toronto boys almost never come home. Tavares, 27, did both.
“You get so connected and your roots get so deep in one place where I’d been, on Long Island,” said Tavares. “You go in there as a 19-year-old and it becomes a part of you, such a big part of your life, that it was really going to take something special, I felt like, to pull me out.”
He found something that did. Tavares was a Mississauga child prodigy, the product of second-generation immigrants from Poland and Portugal. He was a No. 1 pick and was fifth in the league in goal scoring since entering the league in 2009.
But the Islanders are a semihomeless failure of a franchise, even with former Leafs GM Lou Lamoriello now in charge. The Leafs were one of six teams pursuing Tavares and had gone through this with Stamkos two years earlier. They didn’t bring the mayor and the CEO of Canadian Tire this time. They just sold what they had: young talent, a Hall of Fame coach, a window to win a Stanley Cup that Tavares believes stretches over the seven years of the deal.
“I think for me the key was, we had to make this about hockey,” said general manager Kyle Dubas. “Not about anything else.”
“I think there was a quiet confidence,” said team president Brendan Shanahan, who gave Dubas credit for directing the recruiting pitch and for his impressive work in the face-toface meeting last week. “We had a good story to tell.”
It’s better now. Tavares gives the Leafs three of the eight centres in the league who have scored at least 60 goals over the past two seasons, along with Auston Matthews and Nazem Kadri. Tavares will play with winger Mitch Marner, who played at a 92-point pace once he was elevated to the second line last year with Kadri and who, along with Matthews, recruited Tavares.
And Marner is the Thornhill kid who is in the Leafs game introduction video saying, as a bowl-cut-haired child, he wanted to play for the Leafs when he grew up. So many local pros have stayed away because the team stunk, or because the team was cheap or stupid, or because they didn’t want to deal with the attention, the expectations, the pressure. The Leafs have changed and Tavares wasn’t afraid.
“As a kid cheering for the Leafs growing up … you start to go through that feeling again, once I went through the interview process,” Tavares said. “And it was an opportunity. It was once in a lifetime, I felt like. And I’m just like, ‘Why don’t you just go out there and grab it, take your best shot at it and enjoy it?’ ”
The Leafs could have sold hometown nostalgia. Shanahan grew up in Etobicoke, played lacrosse over a high school summer with Tavares’s legendary uncle by the same name, and Shanahan’s older brother Brian won five Mann Cups with that John Tavares. Shanahan also had a Hall of Fame NHL career that included Stanley Cups and an Olympic gold medal, and once told this newspaper that winning here would still mean more to him than anything he ever did as a player.
But that emotional pull wasn’t the focus. Tavares — known for so long for his emotionless front — supplied that part himself. He says some of his earliest memories are Leafs memories, watching on the couch with his dad. He still agonized over this and when he announced it, he tweeted out, “not everyday you can live a childhood dream,” with a picture of himself as a child, asleep in Leafs sheets. The wooden man opened up.
“I would say the last seven days (were that),” Tavares said. “Some heavy feelings, some heavy emotions.”
“I’d never seen the photo he tweeted out today,” said Shanahan. “For any kid to come here, they have to feel there’s an opportunity to have success.”
That’s what has happened here. The Leafs have been a joke for most of 50 years and their fans loved them anyway, even when it was ridiculous, when it was hard. And some of those people grew up to be NHL stars and still had nothing to do with their childhood love. Gretzky, Shanahan, Stam- kos, more. It wasn’t worth it. It was like the kids from small towns who never go back. Best to chase different dreams, somewhere better.
Well, John Tavares believes these Leafs can win a Stanley Cup in the next seven years and he’s right. They will face hard salary cap choices, and the defence may need work, and hockey is a roulette wheel even when you’re great.
But maybe it wasn’t the pressure or the noise that kept people away. Maybe all the Leafs had to do was build a program that was worth it, that lived up to what people wanted the Leafs to be, back when they were kids.
John Tavares left and then he came home.