Marner playing in glaring spotlight
In a different time and in a different sports world, Mitch Marner would have sat down with some friendly scribeby now to share his thoughts on last season and what lies ahead.
But that’s not how things work any more. The divide between media (and fans) and the athletes has never been greater in hockey, particularly in the bigger centres. COVID added another layer to that divide, leaving reporters and columnists to get what they can after games and on off-days via Zoom, hardly the same as sitting down in a quiet corner of the dressing room for 20 minutes.
The advantage of the old system for a player in Marner’s situation would have been that he would have had the opportunity in a relaxed setting to relieve a little bit of the public pressure that has been building ever since the Maple Leafs were eliminated in Game 7 of their first-round series by the Montreal Canadiens, a series in which Marner failed to score a single goal. The resulting headline would have been something like “Marner vows to become a playoff performer” or “Loss to Canadiens still stings for Marner” and that would have been the start of a new conversation for the upcoming 2021-22 NHL season.
But it didn’t happen that way, because it no longer happens that way. The next time we hear from the 24-year-old right winger will probably be around the start of training camp next month, likely in a tightly controlled, relatively brief appearance for all media to attend. Last summer, Marner’s teammate Auston Matthews lost 14 pounds training in Arizona and had a phenomenal regular season. One presumes Marner will have a similar off-season training story to share.
If all goes according to the NHL’s plan to get back to normal, Marner will have 82 games to get through before the real opportunity to prove himself comes in the 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs, assum
ing the Leafs get there again. It’s going to be a long wait.
That’s what happens when you go 18 games in the playoffs without a goal. It’s also what happens when you carry a $10.9-million (U.S.) annual cap hit. Of late, new contracts, and cheaper ones, signed by players like Brayden Point, Sean Couturier and Andrei Svechnikov, have given more ammunition to those who would argue Marner not only disappears in the playoffs, but that he’s overpaid, to boot.
So that’s the environment one of hockey’s best right wingers will confront this fall, and it’s going to be fascinating to see how he responds to it. He might take the predictable approach, say things like “I only care about what the guys in the room think” and keep the media and public at a distance.
Or, he might open up, talk about what he’s done during the off-season to raise his game and engage with the media more than he has in the past. That approach might win him more public support, but not if he fails to play at the high level that made him the NHL’s fourth-leading scorer last season. You don’t want to be the chatty type who can’t produce.
These aren’t easy tactical choices for a young man with incredible wealth and security, an athlete who might be inclined to believe he really doesn’t need the media or the fans because he exists in another world that insulates him from all that white noise.
Here’s what we know. Marner has always been told he was too small, and has always defied the odds. That tells you he has immense drive and ambition. He has been in the spotlight for years, both as a star player with the junior London
Knights and ever since the Leafs made him the fourth pick in the 2015 draft. Being talked about has never scared him before.
Marner has led the Leafs in scoring three of the past four years, and has demonstrated an ability to be the player who feeds Matthews and helps make him arguably the game’s best goal-scorer right now. Marner also kills penalties, generally plays a 200-foot game and competes against elite opposition players most of the time.
He was the engine that drove the Leafs’ power play early last season when it set an NHL record for the first 10 games by clicking at a remarkable 43.3 per cent rate. By the spring, however, it was arguably one of the worst extra strength units in hockey, and the usually imaginative Marner had become predictable and ineffective. Against Montreal in the playoffs, the power play was awful and, not surprisingly, Marner’s numbers were, too.
There will be many young players across the league to watch closely this season, either to see if they can maintain last season’s momentum or bounce back from difficult seasons. Elias Pettersson. Patrik Laine. Pierre-Luc Dubois. Alexis Lafrenière. Cole Caufield. Kirill Kaprizov. Jason Robertson. Cale Makar. Conor Garland. Jack Hughes. And, of course, Jack Eichel. Marner is part of that list, but because he plays in Toronto, the scrutiny will be tripled. Minnesota’s Kevin Fiala, to name one player, had two points and was minus-six in the playoffs for the Wild last spring when that team went down in the first round, but you don’t hear Fiala discussed as a massive playoff bust in the same way Marner is. He makes less money and plays in Minnesota. That’s just reality.
This is Toronto and, in Toronto, the other 31 teams and all those other players don’t exist when it comes to Leafs talk, while years and years of team failure do exist. Perspective is warped.
That means this has long been a bumpy, confusing and often unreasonable road for even talented and established players to navigate. Starting next month, Marner gets to give it a shot.