Is Tavares the right choice as captain?
It should be more obvious than it is, shouldn’t it?
The leader of the Edmonton Oilers is Connor McDavid. Blake Wheeler is the man in Winnipeg. Alex Ovechkin has been in charge in Washington for years. Ditto for Sidney Crosby in Pittsburgh and Jonathan Toews in Chicago.
Patrice Bergeron succeeded Zdeno Chara in Boston. In Vegas, it’s Mark Stone. Even in Seattle, with the expansion Kraken, Mark Giordano is clearly the leader.
In Toronto, meanwhile, the leader is … who?
Officially, it’s John Tavares, the man with the C above his heart. Tavares got the job just over two seasons ago and has had the misfortune of trying to establish himself in that role during the complicated time of COVID-19.
No one would argue he is the heart and soul of the hockey club. Not yet, anyway. Tavares remains a world-class player. From the outside looking in, he appears to be a low-maintenance, low-key athlete and a player who primarily leads by example. No one, other than bitter Islander fans, has a bad word to say about him.
He is the productive player and citizen the Leafs believed they were buying for $77 million (U.S.). So if you’re reading this as an attack on Tavares, you’re reading it wrong. It’s more of a probing question, part of the process of trying to unravel the maddening shortcomings of a team that has repeatedly underachieved and in recent times has rarely appeared to be more than the sum of its parts.
If you don’t believe the identity and character of a captain has anything to do with a team’s ultimate success, then it doesn’t matter whether Tavares is the captain or some other Leaf is captain. Right now, five teams — Arizona, Buffalo, Calgary, the New York Rangers and Ottawa — don’t have captains at all.
Playing without Tavares after the first period of Game 1, the Leafs collapsed in a sevengame playoff loss to Montreal at the end of May. With him, the team got bounced in the 2020 bubble playoffs by a less-talented Columbus team that outworked the Leafs. In 13 playoff games with the Leafs, he has four goals and is minus-8. His arrival has not altered the team’s penchant for post-season failure.
Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner are indisputably Toronto’s marquee players. Morgan Rielly has worn the uniform longer than anyone else. Goalie Jack Campbell and Jason Spezza seem to occupy more of this team’s emotional epicentre.
Tavares feels more like a complementary part. He doesn’t play with an edge or deliver a physical presence like Jake Muzzin does. He doesn’t log particularly heavy minutes. He isn’t a long-serving veteran of the club, like Davey Keon was when he inherited the captaincy from George Armstrong, or Boone Jenner was when he was named captain of the Blue Jackets this season.
When you list the best Leafs captains of the past 50 years, Tavares has yet to make the same indelible mark that Darryl Sittler, Wendel Clark, Doug Gilmour and Mats Sundin did. Then again, he’s only held the job since 2019.
He is respected as a player, and quietly consistent, with 92 goals in his first 205 regularseason games in Toronto. But is quiet consistency what the Leafs, a team that is led by a relatively inexperienced coach and general manager and seems at key moments to lack direction and conviction, require from a captain?
Toronto’s situation when Tavares became captain was complex. Mike Babcock was the head coach, but GM Kyle Dubas was on the verge of firing him. Dubas had signed Tavares and was heavily invested in his success. Matthews was the obvious choice to become the first Toronto captain since Dion Phaneuf, but some off-season stupidity in Arizona indicated a level of immaturity and made that move unpalatable in terms of public relations.
So Tavares got the job, although, like Phaneuf before him, he’d barely had the chance to establish himself in Toronto because he’d only signed as a free agent the year before. Teams that do that with players put them in an incredibly challenging position.
Sometimes, of course, even the best, most committed players don’t work out as team captains. Patrick Marleau was stripped of the captaincy in San Jose back in 2009 after a first-round playoff loss. Much the same thing happened to Joe Thornton a few years later. Oddly enough, both ended up in Toronto as veterans tasked with supplying leadership.
When Mark Messier moved to Vancouver from New York, Trevor Linden surrendered the captaincy to him. That was a complete and utter disaster for everyone involved.
The captaincy of an NHL team is a subtle, often undefinable matter. Tavares was the captain on Long Island from 2013 to 2018 during some very difficult, unstable times. He was widely respected for how he played that role without complaint, but the team had no success.
He may, given time, become the unquestioned leader of the Leafs, but he isn’t right now. When Tavares was felled by the Canadiens’ Corey Perry in May, it still seems curious that it was a newcomer to Toronto, Nick Foligno, who interpreted the accident as an unacceptable assault on the team’s honour and exacted revenge under hockey’s often illogical code. The rest of the team accepted the loss of the captain and tried to simply play on.
As we continue to sort through the puzzle of why the Leafs are what they are, and why they as yet haven’t become a better team despite their talent, the captaincy of the team is worth as much analysis as any other aspect.
You can love and respect Tavares the player, but question whether strong, internal leadership is an element this team lacks.