Deal done, back to business
After long standoff, Nylander and team are keen to get focus back on playing hockey
Tell them Willie Boy is here.
Wait, wrong movie. This was more a Titanic epic, threatening to smash against the iceberg of negotiation deadline, sinking to the bottom of restricted free agency waters, whilst GM Kyle Dubas madly rearranged the salary-cap deck chairs.
Okay, we’re done with that metaphor now.
In any event, Willie Boy — William Nylander — was present and accounted for on Monday, in the Maple Leafs dressing room, chuffed to tell it himself.
Looking very much like the posh $41.77-Million-Dollar Man he has become, wearing a shiny teal three-piece suit, black shirt and suede shoes.
Hockey players are THE best-dressed athletes on the planet.
And all the world is turning on its axis again, with the 22-year-old SwedishCanadian returned to the fold, albeit not yet quite ready for prime-time game action and who knows if he’ll be restored to the Auston Matthews line, which has been clicking along just fine even when injured Matthews wasn’t there, either.
Just a long-delayed medical Monday as his ’mates flew off to Buffalo, but not before Mitch Marner welcomed the prodigal Leaf back with his version of the money dance, cha-cha-ka-chingcha-cha.
Where Nylander has led, the RFA likes of Marner and Auston Matthews are soon enough to follow, to say nothing of other players across the NHL who are even now doing the projected math comps for next summer. But oh, this is a slap-happy ship at the moment, smiles all ’round and a great big gladthat’s-over whew.
“It was a tough process,” Nylander acknowledged. “I mean, it sure was a learning experience that I don’t ever want to go through again. I think it made me a stronger person.” As we now know, the months clicked down to weeks down to hours down to minutes before Nylander finally put his John Henry on a contract Saturday afternoon, deadline looming to avert sitting out a complete season and having do endure the whole schmozzle once more, perhaps never to wear the blue-and-white again.
“I always wanted to be here, so I wasn’t thinking of going anywhere else.”
That was Saturday morning and, apparently, his self-actualization all the way through.
“The last 30 minutes was crazy. I think the contract was signed at 4:53. I couldn’t believe it.”
It was Nylander, in Stockholm, who made the call to Dubas within that last hour. “It was getting into the last 40 minutes before the deadline. I was talking to my agent. I said, let’s just call him.
“I was, like, now we’ve got to get something done here. I talked to the (players’ association) and they said the contract should be called by 4:30. That’s when I called, like, holy s—t, it’s tight.
“That phone call, I think, really got everything done.”
Followed by some frantic texting, assuring that the signed contract was in … the scanner, I guess. Nobody faxes anymore.
“Did you get it? Did you get it? And Kyle, like, yeah we got it. Okay, it’s good.” Then a whirlwind of giddy-up and go. “I was happy for two hours and then the ticket was booked, packed, slept for four hours and then left. It went really fast.”
Six more years a Leaf. Unless, of course, that front-ended contract loses its appeal for the Leafs and they trade him on. Which Nylander is confident won’t happen.
“Kyle has told me multiple times that as long as he’s here, he’s not going to trade me. And from what I saw that Babs (coach Mike Babcock) had said, that I’m going to be here … what did he say? … a long time.” Career Leaf is what Babcock said, after suggesting repeatedly over recent weeks that Nylander would be back, the only indicator of negotiations perhaps progressing from inside the sealed vault of the franchise brain trust.
Dubas echoed the no-trade assurance, a bit couched in qualifiers, though such proclamations should always be taken with a dollop of salt. “He came here a month before I did,” noted the rookie GM. “We had the year with the Marlies. He’s someone who continues to improve and get better. I have faith, knowing him and his intelligence level and dedication to his craft, that he’s only going to continue to improve. He’s not the type of person we want to see walk out of here.”
Dubas scoffed at a reporter’s query about when, or if, he’d reached the “darkest hour” of these prolonged, endlessly discussed (on the media side) negotiations. “I have a hard time with darkest hour when it comes to hockey.” Yay Kyle, and get a grip, reporter. “Any time you get that close to deadline, you start to worry that it may not get done, even though we remained optimistic throughout. He reiterated that. So you retain that optimism, because both parties’ ambition was to have him be here for a long time.”
In fact, contrary to the spin which had gained traction in recent weeks — that the Leafs were doing just fine without Nylander and maybe it would be best if the wildly gifted forward were swapped to fill other roster needs, like a top-four D-man maybe, or he could just be left to rot for the season, the bloody ingrate, too big for his 22-year-old britches — Dubas was clear that he never swung that way.
“As the season started, there began a narrative: well, the team is playing so well, is it really necessary to have him? Should you look to moving him to address other needs? My message to William was: I don’t think our team will be at its full potential until he’s back and a part of it. Only then can we really assess our team.’’
Nylander admitted that he’d never foreseen the stalemate would last this long.
He’d watched only a few Leafs game from afar, was wowed by the team’s performance, enjoyed the early goal-racking by Matthews and Marner and John Tavares. Missed them, though teammates texted frequently, one even saying he’d dreamed that Nylander had signed.
But what are you going to do? Somewhere — and Nylander was clear that neither his dad Michael nor his agent Lewis Gross were pulling the strings — the young man was able to keep his nerve. “Both sides were holding their ground and wanting what they wanted. That’s why it took the time.”
If there was a psychological breakthrough, a tentative meeting of the minds, it occurred in mid-October when Dubas went to Sweden to speak with Nylander, man-to-man, one-on-one, nobody else present.
“That’s just more my style,” said Dubas. “I wasn’t going to let this thing go on without me sitting across from him, face to face, and seeing what may have been bothering him, what was preventing the process from moving forward, various things that we had been doing or we could change.’’
Nylander: “That was probably the first time I talked to Kyle by myself. That meant a lot. It started to get stuff moving.”
Interestingly, Dubas shouldered the blame for the impasse.
“It came down to the last five, six minutes. Took that long. Frankly disappointed in myself that it did. I’m obviously hopeful that we learned from it. I don’t want any of our players to have to go through this again. I don’t want the coaching staff or our organization to have that distraction.
“That falls on me. Learn from it.”