Can Leafs complete the puzzle?
A year ago this time, no one was talking about the Washington Capitals winning the Stanley Cup. They were, apparently, a team in decline. They had missed their opportunity. They had lost some quality players. Then they managed the improbable: In Alexander Ovechkin’s 13th season, in Nicklas Backstrom’s 11th season and 10 years after John Carlson and Braden Holtby had been drafted — a hockey lifetime for so many — they carried the Cup and seemingly haven’t stopped carrying it since.
The lesson in this, after two Pittsburgh Penguins championships — with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin winning seven years after they won their first Cups — is that there is no one way of winning anymore in the National Hockey League. There is no clear path. The templates have all been broken or altered. And the Toronto Maple Leafs, here in the place where hockey and traffic and breathing are just part of daily life, and have not contended for a Cup since the NHL grew from six teams to 12, are now in the conversation, a contender that hasn’t yet won a playoff round, but a contender nonetheless.
The Leafs came within one game of playing for the Stanley Cup in 1993. The truth: That team came out of nowhere in Pat Burns’ first season coaching in Toronto. They were a 67-point team the year before. They were no one’s pick to win anything, let alone a playoff spot. And we know what happened, have been over it too many times, because they’ve never, ever been close since. Burns took the Leafs back to the semifinals the following season and they got there twice with Pat Quinn coaching, but in each of those series, one loss to Vancouver, one to Buffalo, one to Carolina, there was little reason to believe this was a championship team just waiting to hatch. Training camp opens for the Maple Leafs on Thursday and at no time since the pre-expansion days has a camp begun with such large expectations. There is great reason to believe in these Leafs. The Capitals won the Stanley Cup and their centres were spectacular, combining for 73 points in the post-season. The Leafs will be on the ice Friday in Niagara Falls with Auston Matthews, John Tavares and Nazem Kadri as their top three centres, a reasonable comparable to the Cup championship trio of Evgeny Kuznetsov, Backstrom and Lars Eller.
It is easy to see the Leafs, even with their defensive flaws, as contenders. But just being a contender isn’t good enough as the Capitals would tell you from all their years of disappointments. When you win, all that gets pushed to the side — but actually doing it, finding a way to win, that’s the great challenge here for coach Mike Babcock and his players.
Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane won the Stanley Cup in Chicago in what was, for both of them, their third NHL season. Toews turned 22 that year. Kane, with a late birthday, was 21, when he lifted the Cup for the first time. Combined they scored 57 playoff points for their first of three Cup wins.
They were the kids, but the Blackhawks made a significant free agent signing before the 2009-10 season. They brought in Marian Hossa, a 30-year-old who had lost Stanley Cup finals in Pittsburgh and Detroit the previous two years. In his 13th NHL season, he played a gigantic role in Chicago winning for the first time. Matthews and Mitch Marner are in their third NHL seasons. Matthews turns 21 next week. Marner turns 22 in May, when the Leafs still should be playing. Different as they might be from Toews and Kane, there is no doubting that they are difference-makers, the kind who win crowns.
Tavares joins the Leafs in his 10th NHL season, even though he’s just 27, hoping to do for Matthews and Marner what Hossa did for Toews and Kane.
The biggest of stars usually find a way to win the Cup. Crosby won his first of three in his fourth NHL season. Kane was in his third. Drew Doughty won his first of two in Los Angeles in his fourth season. Wayne Gretzky won in his fifth NHL season. It took Mario Lemieux longer, seven seasons, because those Pittsburgh teams were so horrible to start they needed time to build into something.
The Leafs have been building since Brendan Shanahan took over the franchise and this is Year 5 for him. He took in a season of absolute failure, a season of strategically bottoming out, and two building seasons with Matthews, Marner and William Nylander since then.
Can they be the Blackhawks or the Kings or the Penguins, winning early and on target with their star players? Can they be that model franchise? Or will they have to play the long game, the way the Capitals managed: Washington lost in the years it was supposed to win and won in the year it was supposed to lose. This is new here in Toronto. Brand new. The Maple Leafs are legitimate contenders. What they do with that, how they handle it, well, we’re about to find out.