Marner’s play makes case for rich deal
The question that occurs to you, when you rewatch the latest in the line of Mitch Marner’s brilliant setups, is where did he see the opportunity?
You’ll remember the scene. The Maple Leafs were on the power play late in Monday’s 3-1 loss to the Flames. Marner was standing on the left wing below the faceoff dot when Morgan Rielly, rushing in from the right point, hit him with a sharp pass. And, seen in the moment, the odds of Marner making a successful connection from there seemed slim. Flames goaltender Mike Smith had slid across to challenge a potential shot. Travis Hamonic, the Calgary Flames defenceman on the scene, seemed well positioned to take away a pass. Yet Marner, taking Rielly’s great feed and releasing another in a nanosecond, somehow found a way to thread the puck through Hamonic’s legs.
When it zipped through a net-front Patrick Marleau’s legs, too, even Jim Hughson, the excellent Sportsnet playby-play voice, didn’t recognize what Marner was up to.
“One pass too many,” was Hughson’s in-the-moment call of Marner’s decision.
It was only after Marner’s intended target Nazem Kadri easily lifted the puck into a gaping net that Hughson adjusted on the fly. One pass too many … “… but they get the goal,” Hughson said.
That bang-bang play, in a lot of ways, neatly encapsulated Marner’s short career as a Maple Leaf.
Like the player who authored it, it amounted to a little bit of genius, wholly underestimated until the result spoke for itself.
So it was fitting that on Monday, after the Maple Leafs announced that Auston Matthews will be out at least a month with another shoulder injury, Marner quietly pulled even with Matthews for the team lead in points with 16.
So far the leading storylines of this Maple Leafs season have revolved John Tavares’s arrival and a scoring binge from Matthews that elevated him, in some eyes, into the best-playerin-the-game conversation. When those two centremen haven’t been the primary focus of coverage, William Nylander’s ongoing contract squabble has prevailed.
The point is, if you didn’t follow this team closely you’d probably never know it was Marner who led the Maple Leafs in scoring last year in both the regular season and the playoffs. But maybe that’s about to change.
Long overshadowed by Matthews and often erroneously co-billed with Nylander, Marner looks poised to make the coming month his moment. For the time being, after all, he’s the only one of Toronto’s big three young guns actually available to rack up numbers. And so far his numbers are awfully impressive.
Marner has 16 points in 12 games, a 109-point pace in an 82-game season. To put that in context, in the previous 10 seasons the list of players who’ve had 109-point campaigns in their third NHL season goes one deep, according to HockeyReference.com: Evgeni Malkin. The list of third-year players who’ve reached even 100 points since 2008-09 isn’t much longer. Connor McDavid did it. Ditto Nick Backstrom. That’s it.
And as much as it would be easy to dismiss Marner’s early pace as a puck-luck-driven anomaly — he managed just 69 points last season — there’s reason to believe it’s not. A season ago Marner didn’t get the benefit of a decent set of linemates and half-decent playing time until late January. But in the 36 games after Babcock elevated Marner into a top-six role — well, it was electric.
Marner scored at a 92-point pace. He reeled off nine points in seven post-season games. And then he arrived in camp, stronger and noticeably more muscled having spent a summer working on his body and his shot, and was reduced to a relative footnote compared to Matthews and Tavares and Nylander and even newly inserted GM Kyle Dubas.
Speaking of the GM, it’s difficult to fathom why Dubas didn’t sign Marner to a contract extension before this season. The summertime buzz was that an eight-year deal worth an annual average of around $9 million U.S. might have done it.
As it is, Marner’s agent, Darren Ferris, said last month that he wasn’t interested in negotiating once the season began. And as for taking a hometown discount, Ferris told TSN radio a while back: “Mitch did that on his first contract, even against my wishes.”
Ferris was referring to Marner forgoing the so-called B-schedule bonuses on his entry-level contract, bonuses Matthews was given despite then-GM Lou Lamoriello’s no-bonus rhetoric.
In any case, Marner is going to be expensive. Look at the company he’s keeping. Marner, who’s just 21, has 146 points through his first 171 NHL games.
Tavares, at the same juncture of his career, had 12 fewer points, Jack Eichel had 10 fewer points, Jonathan Toews four fewer. Patrick Kane, through 171 games, put up four more points than Marner. But Kane, at that juncture, had played 300 more minutes — the equivalent of about 17 more games at 17 minutes a night. None of those players currently earns a cap hit less than $10 million U.S.
And Marner, thanks to relatively meagre ice time, can’t be judged fairly by simple point totals. Measure him with a more advanced stat — points per 60 minutes since 2007, courtesy of Corsica Hockey — and he jumps up a level. This is a list populated by the game’s very elite. Sidney Crosby leads it. Malkin is second. McDavid is third, Matthews fourth. And Marner ranks 10th, not far behind the likes of Alex Ovechkin, Nikita Kucherov, Kane and Steven Stamkos.
In other words, on almost any other team, with almost any other set of teammates, he’s a no-question No. 1 guy. And with this opportunity staring him in the face, with Matthews hurt and Nylander unsigned, who’d bet against him finishing No. 1 on Toronto’s scoring chart for a second straight year?
Ferris has said he won’t negotiate in-season. Dubas ought to test that premise. Long underestimated, one gets the feeling Marner is of no mind to be underpaid. And the price doesn’t appear to be going down.