More bang for the puck
Leafs can only hope teammates follow Clifford’s example
Here’s a free business idea for the sports-minded capitalists out there: Someone ought to start a hockey school that teaches the dying arts of the game’s darker side.
Call it the Darcy Tucker Institute of Truculence. Or maybe the Wendel Clark Boarding School of Highly Skilled Belligerence. Licence fees may or may not be easily negotiated, sure. But I’m telling you, demand would be undeniable. As Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas was saying this past week, responding to critics who’ve derided his team’s absence of on-ice malice, we’ve arrived at a point in the sport’s speed- and skill-based evolution when players in the mould of those rugged ex-Leafs have become an endangered species. At his best, Clark scored goals like a machine while hitting like a truck. Tucker enjoyed six 20-goal seasons while patenting a brand of crazy-eyed vigilantism that drove opponents to distraction.
Maybe it’s not a coincidence that both were key members of two of the last Maple Leaf teams that made a run to the Stanley Cup semifinals. All these years later, reasonable facsimiles are few and far between.
“You look across the league, everybody talks about the need to have (one of those players),” said Sheldon Keefe, the Maple Leafs’ coach. “But there’s not many out there left.”
As scarce as the supply may be, it said something that Dubas took steps to add one this past week, plucking salt-of-the-earth forward Kyle Clifford from the Los Angeles Kings in the deal that also brought goaltender Jack Campbell to Leafland. Clifford had a mixed impact in his opening appearance — providing both infectious physicality and a third-period holding-the-stick penalty that led to Anaheim’s game-tying power-play goal in Toronto’s 5-4 overtime win on Friday.
But it’s not difficult to imagine Clifford becoming a fan favourite in a city that’s always prized its board-rattling grinders. Certainly he’ll be an outlier among the Maple Leafs, who ranked last in the league in penalty minutes heading into Saturday’s game in Montreal and have been accused by resident conscience Jake Muzzin of wanting the game to be too “easy.”
The 29-year-old Clifford, in contrast to the gifted ranks of Toronto’s skill-strewn personnel, has made it his career-long mission to make the game hard on opponents. And that only fits with the humble beginnings of the native of rural Ayr, Ont., whose teenage jobs included time on a horse farm earning $10 an hour “shovelling s--t.”
Once nicknamed the Colonel — this
because the initials of his full name, Kyle Frank Clifford, are KFC — he’s made his NHL bones as the opposite of chicken, albeit with a game that’s unapologetically greasy.
“He’s going to bring jam,” is how Dallas Eakins, the former Marlies coach who now runs the Anaheim Ducks bench, put it this past week.
Not that Clifford, a veteran of 80-plus NHL fights, was brought in to drop the gloves, Dubas said.
“I know it’s part of the game. It’s a difficult thing, especially now, to ask somebody to (fight),” Dubas said. “I know he has that element. He’s certainly a tough person. But that’s not really how we define (toughness).”
Dubas, to the contrary, said he acquired Clifford for his competitive streak, for his pair of Stanley Cup rings, and — above all — for combining those attributes with an ability to competently “drive play” at the league’s ever-increasing pace.
While observers have noted Toronto’s lack of an unpredictable edge since the departure of the likes of Nazem Kadri, Leo Komarov, Matt Martin and Roman Polak, Dubas said he’s only “shied away” from players with sandpaper-esque qualities when those players “can’t play” — in the highly skilled Kadri’s case, one assumes, on account of him being suspended for eight of Toronto’s 14 most recent playoff games.
“If you have those elements to your game, that you’re physical and competitive and you have a presence to you, you have to be able to play,” Dubas said.
“I know people will doubt the logic behind (that thinking), but we play some teams, they play some guys one or two minutes a night. And all it does is throw off your chemistry, your bench, your number of guys actually eligible to play the game. (Clifford) can play. And those guys aren’t in abundance anymore. I think that’s why when they’re available, the cost is pretty high.”
Indeed, there’s a reason why the leading purveyor of combining the power of intimidation with seamless top-six integration, Washington’s Tom Wilson, earns an annual average of $5.2 million (U.S.).
“You’d like to develop your own (such players),” Dubas said. “The greater issue to that is if you go to amateur and college and junior hockey, there’s a very, very scarce number of those players there as well. It’s just not a common player that’s available these days, frankly.”
Which speaks to the idea of founding, say, the Gary Roberts College of Physicality. Keefe said the Leafs’ developmental apparatus is currently attempting to do as much. Since speed and skill are non-negotiable in today’s game, the thinking is that a dose of pugnacity can be instilled in still-developing prospects.
“I think it’s more now that you’re going to be trying to teach the physicality and competitiveness and the importance of that to the skill people, rather than teach the skill to the physical and competitive,” Keefe said.
Can you actually teach truculence?
“I believe you can,” Keefe said.
Ditto Eakins, who was talking this past week about cultivating the kind of uncompromising competitiveness that wins Stanley Cups. Eakins likened the process to a player approaching the edge of a cliff. At first, the player might only be comfortable going 12 feet from the precipice.
But it’s the coach’s job to push those limits.
“You’ve got to take another step closer and, ‘OK, now I’m eight feet.’ So that’s a step in the right direction on your fear factor,” Eakins said. “And I think if it doesn’t come naturally to you, you’ve got to find a way to develop that mindset. And I do think it can be learned, like anything.”
Given how most Maple Leafs generally reside at a morethan-safe distance from anyone’s idea of a perilous edge, the club can only hope the new addition’s relative fearlessness rubs off on a teammate or three.
If it does, and Toronto’s NHL team finds the kind of success that’s long eluded them, you know the obvious entrepreneurial response. The Kyle Clifford Academy of Jam, opening soon.