To quiet ghosts, focus should be here
The Olympics were simply an added variable the Leafs and other teams didn’t need
Not for a millisecond should fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs be unhappy that the NHL is set to announce it will no longer participate in the Beijing Olympics.
Why should they? Sending a quarter of the team or more to mainland China in the middle of a pandemic just isn’t something that could possibly help a team trying to quiet the ghosts of 1967 and erase its reputation as a team of talented underachievers.
Yes, yes, we all know hockey fans are supposed to take the larger view here, parrot all the hockey missionary nonsense about “growing the game” — how about growing it first with marginalized communities here in North America? — and feel badly that Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid won’t get to skate on the same line while wearing Canadian colours.
Sure, that would have been entertaining. But, beyond that, hockeymad Canadians really only care when their teams, men and women, are playing. NHL owners, meanwhile, have demonstrated forcefully they no longer care much about international hockey. The players union didn’t care enough to put participation in the 2018 Olympics in their collective agreement with the league, and the majority of union members don’t play.
Really, we are back to a time, in men’s hockey at least, in which the Stanley Cup matters to North Americans significantly more than any other prize in hockey. If Olympic gold ever came close, perhaps as recently as 2010, it no longer does.
And if that’s the case, why would any team want to hinder its chances of winning the Cup by exposing its best athletes to injury, illness, jet lag, COVID quarantine and all the other potential negatives of Olympic participation?
There have undoubtedly been players who elevated their stature and even their own view of themselves in international play. Jarome Iginla in 2002 is a great example of that. But you might also remember current Leafs captain John Tavares, then with the New York Islanders, suffering a season-ending knee injury playing for Canada at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
“Are the IIHF or IOC going to reimburse our season ticket holders now?” said a bitter Islanders general manager Garth Snow.
With respect to the Leafs, the 2021-22 edition is fourth in the NHL after having played 30 games going into this unscheduled Christmas “pause.”
A 2-4-1 start to the season that had many suggesting the team built by Kyle Dubas was poised to take a step backward is now but a memory.
Management’s response to that sluggish beginning was basically to calmly sign defenceman Morgan Rielly to a long-term deal and assume a steady-as-she-goes posture. The result has been an 18-4-1 charge that has positioned the team for a serious playoff run in the spring.
Yes, we’ve heard that optimism before. Yes, we know that Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner have not distinguished themselves as playoff performers. Yes, we know the Leafs blew a 3-1 series lead to Montreal last spring, a collapse lamented by team president Brendan Shanahan as evidence that there was a “killer instinct missing that we have to address.”
Sure, exactly the same thing could happen again. It’s unclear if David Kämpf, Michael Bunting and Ondrej Kaše will be what Zach Hyman, Joe Thornton and Alex Galchenyuk weren’t. So if that’s where the conversation ends for you, well, that’s where it ends.
But the sports world is filled with teams that couldn’t get out of their own way until, finally, they did, and the Leafs at full strength could be that team in the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs. That’s assuming the NHL can fight its way through yet another COVID logistical nightmare.
As of Monday, almost 20 per cent of active NHLers were on the COVID list, and 50 games had been postponed. Based on the last two seasons, the NHL has the means and the expertise to finish the season and conduct a playoff tournament. The Leafs’ core has gone through not only playoff disappointments together but also all the disruptions created by COVID over the past two seasons. When you see the team perform as it did last week in Edmonton, it’s hard not to see it as more mature.
Some teams, we know, will weather the storm created by COVID and the Omicron variant better than others, and some teams will be hit harder than others. Four more Leafs — Kämpf, winger Ilya Mikheyev, defenceman Rasmus Sandin and hard-luck goalie Petr Mrazek — went into the NHL’s COVID-19 protocol, the team announced Tuesday.
The long-term impact of the virus sweeping through the team is unclear. If the Leafs are really expected to play in Columbus next Tuesday, it’s not clear how many players will be available. Or whether crossborder competition will happen.
The healthiest and most adaptable clubs will be the most successful.
The Olympics were simply an added variable the Leafs and other teams didn’t need.
Declining to support the corrupt International Olympic Committee and the international sports ambitions of the authoritarian Chinese just months after two Canadians were released from arbitrary longterm detention by the Beijing government might not be priorities for many NHL players, but others are free to note their significance as ancillary benefits to the NHL’s decision not to go.
Maybe a team like Tampa Bay, with the last two Stanley Cups in its back pocket, could have afforded to let its players dream the Olympic dream. And now that the dream is gone? “We’ll go for another Stanley Cup,” defenceman Victor Hedman said. “That will be a good makeup for us.”
The Leafs don’t have Tampa’s record of success. Going to Beijing was always going to be a bad bargain for them. Now it’s gone. That’s good.