Want to help Leafs win? Try listening to my dad
Few things make less sense than being a sports fan: a.k.a. investing time, money and tears in a group of strangers whose actions have no lasting impact on your life.
But absolutely nothing makes less sense than being a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, a franchise that exists, it seems, to rev us up and break our hearts; a franchise whose most consistent achievement in recent history is almost making it past the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Yet here we are and here I am, roughly two months into a season our hockey team was supposed to dominate, griping about how profoundly we don’t dominate. On the contrary, we stink. As I write this, news is breaking that Leafs head coach Mike Babcock has been fired, in no small part because the Leafs have lost all but two of their past 16 games.
If you want to see the physical embodiment of this losing streak, behold the now-viral meme of a young, sombre-faced Leafs fan feigning a smile for a selfie in the stands at the team’s recent 6-1 defeat to the Pittsburgh Penguins. The smile says it all. Unlike fans of the Toronto Raptors who long expected defeat but experienced victory, Leafs fans long expect victory and experience defeat.
There are a million theories about why we stink and how we may cease to stink, most of them involving some variation on: “fire Babcock” (done) and “trade Nylander.” But I’ve come up with different theory, one aimed at fixing not the Leafs, but us. I call it the
Calm the F--k Down theory, and it’s based on two entities.
The first is the Florida Panthers, who, it’s rumoured, have an NHL team that boasts a record of 11 wins and five losses, putting them in second place in the Atlantic Division (the Leafs’ own). It’s rumoured, because no one in Florida watches the Panthers. They are treated as though they don’t exist.
The second entity is Billy Beane, the executive vicepresident and ex-general manager of baseball’s Oakland Athletics. As GM, Beane (of “Moneyball” fame) was famous for refusing to watch his team play. In the 2002 season, the A’s set an American League record by winning 20 straight games in a row, all while Beane was, presumably, not watching.
So that’s the theory: don’t watch. I don’t mean turn our rabid Leaf fan base into a casual one; I mean turn it into an absent one. We go cold turkey, we cut ourselves off. We become helicopter parents who chain themselves to the kitchen table while their eight-yearold daughter is out riding her bike on the street. We don’t forget to watch, we remember not to. We passionately do not watch. It works for the Florida Panthers. It worked for Billy Beane. Why shouldn’t it work for us?
Up to now, we’ve been helicopter parents who don’t just stalk their precocious kids, we breathe down their necks. But of course, you may say, we’re desperate for the Leafs to go all the way, to bring us a Cup. But what if those very talented kids aren’t ready to go all the way? And what if our demands that they do so this very minute aren’t doing them any favours?
“It’s a lot of pressure to play here,” former Leaf great Mats Sundin, in town for an oldtimers’ game, recently told the media. “It’s extra attention for management, for players. You go through tough spurts in a season with all teams, but it’s a little bit tougher (in Toronto).”
And Mats didn’t have to deal with Twitter. I know the young Leafs today are probably advised to shun social media, but I’m guessing they don’t.
Yes, they’re paid millions of dollars to perform, and outsized criticism is part of their job. But they aren’t performing.
So perhaps in the service of calming their addled nerves, and lighting a fire under their nervous butts, we should treat the Toronto Maple Leafs to the one saving grace we’ve always denied them: indifference. Don’t watch. Am I aware this is a radical idea, possibly insane? Yes. Is it possible the Leafs will turn it around under a newer and (hopefully) more flexible coach? Yes. But I’m not an analytics expert nor am I applying for the now vacant seat beside Ron MacLean. I’m an ordinary, desperate fan, willing to do whatever it takes to get to the pot of gold at the end of the season.
Finally, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that I first heard about this idea from my father. This was during the first round of last year’s playoffs, when the Leafs were playing the Boston Bruins. I called my dad the night of Game 2, and asked him what he was doing. “Not watching the Leafs,” he said.
I was intrigued, but a little unclear on the details.
“It’s like this,” he said. “I come to you with a contract and I say, if you will agree never to watch the Leafs play, live or in replay, again, I will guarantee that they will win four Stanley Cups in the next seven years. Would you take the deal?”
Where do I sign?