Are you up just now for hearing one of the all-time great anti-Toronto rants?

Yeah, me too.

Edmonton booster Bob Stauffer, the ultimate Oilers inside, let it rip against Toronto over various voices out of Toronto who have suggested that negotiations between the Edmonton Oilers and Connor McDavid aren’t necessarily on track.

Stauffer kicked off his epic slam with a question to fellow announcer Brenden Escott. ”

“Brenden, do you ever think where things are being driven from?… There was some consternation. Oo you think that there might be guys working in Toronto that would like nothing more than to see McDavid there in Toronto. Many of them grew up in Toronto. They haven’t gotten to a Stanley Cup final since I was one. Okay? That’s 58 years ago. That’s a long time… I got a good memory, but I don’t remember that 1967 Leafs team. I don’t. Apparently, I was watching it a little bit back in the day. But they haven’t got to a Stanley Cup final. How many times have they won more than a series?”

Stauffer pointed out that Leafs star Auston Matthews has signed just five and four years deals with the Leafs, and that fellow Toronto ace Mitch Marner just left the city to play in Vegas.

“Circling back to McDavid, there’s always been a little bit of this undertone. And this is part of the reason why some of the people that work in the game in other Canadian markets don’t like Toronto. Because there is this air of superiority, not from all… It’s not even understated, it’s pretty overt. ‘Oh yeah, you guys don’t really deserve him, and he’s gonna wanna play here, and that’s just the way it’s gonna be.’”

Stauffer asked Escott what he made of it all.

Said Escott: ” I would suggest that I haven’t seen any — maybe until the last day and a half or so — anything coming out of Edmonton that would lead me to believe that McDavid is going anywhere else. It’s completely outside noise. It comes from Toronto mostly, it comes from Calgary a lot, and they seem to piggyback off of one another. They’ve got to have something to talk about all summer long too. Unfortunately, we had to talk about what they were talking about so as to calm the waters in this market.”

A moment later Stauffer continued to bomb away. “Sometimes there’s not a lot of logic in Toronto, or in the province of Ontario. Some might say, their premier, who is a conservative, is really a liberal. Their mayor is, I don’t even know what to describe with the mayor, but certainly interesting. And these days, not too safe, but it’s okay. Go dump your bottle of booze to show how tough you are.”

And: “I don’t always think we have to take our marching orders from Toronto. That’s why we crack jokes like, ‘How do you change a light bulb in Toronto? You hold it there and have the rest of Canada revolve around it.’ ”

My take

1. OK, a few of Stauffer’s lines made me laugh aloud. Of course, we’re all siting a little easier in Edmonton just now after Oilers hockey boss Jeff Jackson went on Oilers Now one day ago to calm down fans over the McDavid negotiation, saying everything was in order and a deal was there to (eventually) be had.

2. Things had been stirred up in Edmonton after Ontario-based NHL insider John Shannon went on his his 100% Hockey podcast last week and said, “There are people in Edmonton holding their breath. I think there’s people in the Oilers office holding their breath… It’s not going to be announced in training camp. He’s going to go into the regular season without a new contract.”

This message contradicted the general message out of Edmonton all summer from insiders like Stauffer that McDavid was likely to sign before Sept. 1, which did not come to pass. But there was no doubt from Jackson’s latest interview that a deal is in the works.

3. Is there any basis for Stauffer’s rant against some members of the Toronto media and Toronto in general?

That is a rhetorical question.

I’ve lived in Toronto twice now, once in 1985 when I was a summer student at the Toronto Star, then again in 1995-96 when I was Southam Fellow at Massey College, the University of Toronto. I loved the city plenty well, but the elites there tend to be obsessed with the same thing, making it big in New York or London.

Toronto felt as much like the rest of Canada as Seattle or Detroit do. The average Torontonian thinks about Edmonton about as much as Edmontonians think about Drayton Valley. We’re not on their radar, except as an occasional irritant. In general, that’s normal, natural and reasonable, but it falls apart when Toronto carelessly and self-servingly tries to boss around the rest of the country.

If you want to hear some real hate, just listen to what chauvinist and elitist Ontario commentators have to say any time Alberta asserts its right for fair treatment under the Constitution, or pushes for less of an economic gouge from under-performing but politically powerful parts of Canada. We’re written off as crazy loons and/or traitors, but keep in mind this verbal assault from an insular and sanctimonious group that has essentially run Ontario into the ground economically, overseeing the transformation of a prosperous and well-ordered province into the poor, old Sick Man of North America.

4. On the hockey front, Thornhill’s McDavid ending up in Edmonton, just as Brantford’s Wayne Gretzky did, was something of a nightmare for many Leaf fans and Toronto boosters, and it’s been making them crazy ever since. I’ve detailed this in the past, but if you’re wondering what’s bugging Stauffer, here’s the brief but recent history of the matter.

5. It started in 2015 when the Oilers won the draft lottery with McDavid the prize. At once, Toronto sports writers covered themselves in bull dung. Some of them read McDavid’s pensive reaction to the lottery as him not wanting to come to Edmonton. Toronto Sun sportswriter Steve Simmons opined on TSN: “There is a reason that he looked unhappy, it’s because he was unhappy … This isn’t where Connor McDavid wanted to be drafted to.”

On TSN’s panel The Reporters, other veteran Eastern Canadian pundits weighed, egged on by host Dave Hodge’s thinly-veiled disdain for anything associated with Edmonton and the then dismal Oilers.

Said the Toronto Star’s Bruce Arthur: “The Edmonton Oilers are going to have Connor McDavid’s career to play with. This is not good.”

The most ridiculous comment belonged to the Hodge, saying “he clearly wanted to be a Buffalo Sabre” and how we “would have seen a different expression on his face if the odds had held up”.

6. More ant-Oilers agitprop abounded at the time. The Oilers were certain to ruin McDavid, some sports commentators argued, starting with (again) Bruce Arthur, who tweeted seconds after the Oilers won the pick: “And that was the day that Connor McDavid was ruined.”

7. If you thought the mind-reading and body language hallucinations were bad, Toronto sports commentator Jeff Blair, a Sportsnet columnist, reached a new low with his modest proposal that the NHL should have rigged the draft lottery to gift McDavid to the Maple Leafs. “McDavid would have been of maximum marketing value and would have had the most immediate positive impact in Toronto,” said Blair.

Toronto is a rich hockey market that deserved McDavid, he added. : “The Maple Leafs have bankrolled the NHL for a long time. … It would have been nice to get a McBone thrown in their direction, you know? Professional sports is about entertainment and marketing and money and TV and such. Fairness sometimes sucks. Connor McDavid should be a Maple Leaf, and everyone knows it – including McDavid himself.”

6. The burbling picked up again in 2019 when the Oilers were down and out, costing then GM Peter Chiarelli his job. Having made the division finals in 2017, Chiarelli’s Oilers crashed in 2017-18 and 2018-19, largely due to untimely major injuries to Edmonton’s top two d-men, Oscar Klefbom and Andrej Sekera.

Justin Bourne, the otherwise sane and reasonable senior hockey columnist with of The Athletic at time, said on Toronto radio he hoped McDavid would ask out from Edmonton. “You know he wants to…. I’m sure he wants to get the hell out of there but there’s not really a way to do it without creating some LeBron James-esque fire storm with the decision. I would love to see it. That would be great theatre, wouldn’t it?… All I know is I really want this to happen.”

7. Bourne wasn’t alone in Toronto in 2019 trying to stick the knife in. The same Bruce Arthur piped in: “We’ll need suction cups and ropes, flashlights and hacksaws. We’ll need a balaclava or two, and a plan. Because it’s time to start thinking about freeing Connor McDavid.”

Arthur continued: “Connor McDavid doesn’t deserve this. He shouldn’t be trapped in hockey hell. He hasn’t even hinted he wants anything else; he’s a hockey player under contract, after all. He took the money, though less than he could have…. But the franchise is wasting a singular career. This is not arguable. The Oilers have made the playoffs once in McDavid’s first three years because they ran a goalie on a hot streak out there 73 times, and Edmonton outscored opponents 77-47 at 5-on-5 with McDavid on the ice.”

8. The last major gasp of Toronto’s McDavid envy came after Winnipeg beat Edmonton in the first round of the 2021 playoffs.

First, we had Breakfast Television host Sid Seixeiro of Toronto, who used to be on the Toronto Sports Network, infamously saying: “Connor McDavid’s not going to put up with this much longer.”

Then there was the imperious Cathal Kelly of Toronto’s national newspaper, the Globe & Mail, pushing McDavid to do his bidding: “If McDavid wants out of Edmonton, it’s on him to make that happen. He should do that. He’d be doing everyone involved a favour.”

And if McDavid should reject the command of Cathal the Great to force a trade? It would apparently be McDavid’s doom: “As long as they have the best player in the known galaxy, the Oilers can continue being operatic failures. People will still pay to see him play. Maybe becoming the new Marcel Dionne and making eight figures is enough for McDavid. Let’s hope so. Because that’s where he’s headed.”

9. What did all this anti-Edmonton Oilers sniping and McDavid doom-speak get Toronto? A boat load of bad karma, I’ll suggest. The Leafs have flunked out of the playoffs repeatedly, while the Oilers won two series in 2022, a series in 2023, three series in 2024 and three series in 2025.

Edmonton didn’t ruin McDavid. He’s created his hockey legend here and has every intention on adding to his and the teamn’s glory.

10. This brings me to this latest round of agitation, early in the Oilers latest run to the Cup Final with Toronto’s Arthur conjecturing in early June 2025 that McDavid might well have a special place in his heart for the Leafs and Toronto.

“One of the great quiet hopes in Toronto was always that Edmonton would be incompetent enough — or would stay incompetent enough, after one playoff series in the first six seasons of McDavid and Leon Draisaitl — that McDavid, a proud son of Thornhill, would want to come home…. That dream, of course, doesn’t die. McDavid is signed through next season.”

In the end, I’ve met enough great Toronto fans and seen enough excellent reporting from some Toronto sports commentators not to have any kind of major grudge against the Leafs. I’d love to see an Oilers-Leafs Stanley Cup Final. Outside of a Canada-USA Olympic