Brad Marchand helped the Florida Panthers to their second consecutive Stanley Cup win after joining the team at the trade deadline.Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
Before the Florida Panthers had knocked the Oilers out in six, the conversations started popping up online – “Guess the Leafs gave the world champions their toughest fight.”
Someone pointed out that “43 per cent” of the Panthers’ losses this postseason had come courtesy of Toronto.
This brand of magical thinking has been a sports mind worm for a century, but it has accelerated power in the information age because it can be written down and circulated.
An aggregation of this glass-four-fifths-full outlook affects the choices of professional sports executives. They take it as a sign that the fans are with them. Since they are more interested in keeping their jobs than, ha ha, making the team “better,” all they want to do is the popular thing. If Reddit tells them that not much needs to change, then not much will change.
With seasonal tweaks, that’s why what happens to the Leafs keeps happening.
It’s also why teams located in places where no one spends the summer discussing the vagaries of opt-out clauses keep winning Stanley Cups. It’s not just the taxes. It’s also the calm.
Up here in Toronto, we have no wiggle to our game. So it’s time to keep kidding ourselves.
The latest pipe dream focuses on the Panthers. They have three major free agents coming off their books: Brad Marchand, Sam Bennett and Aaron Ekblad. All were key figures in winning the Cup. Why not just hire them? Or, if you want to keep it reasonable, hire two of them?
Mitch Marner is leaving. That’s obvious. Toronto broke his spirit. One Marner’s worth might be enough to pay both Marchand and Bennett. There’s definitely enough if they cancel John Tavares’ key card.
Tavares has a bunch of small, nagging issues – his age, his mobility, the fact that he still wants to play here. Have the Leafs ever hired someone who wanted to be a Leaf? Not just said it, but actually meant it? Probably not, and this is no time to start. Save the sentimentality for the next teardown, which is about two years away.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman gives Florida Panthers’ Sam Bennett the Conn Smythe trophy.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
And how about they convince Morgan Rielly to fire himself? He’s got a full no-trade clause that the Leafs once thought was a great idea. It lasts until he’s about 80. Toronto should rehire Kyle Dubas so they can fire him again for agreeing to that.
That said, Rielly seems like a reasonable guy. You just get him in a room and tell him how you’ll always appreciate what he’s done for you, but now it’s time for him to embrace humiliation, sell his house and move to the U.S. just before the civil war starts, so he can lose 50 games a year in San Jose. He’ll get it.
Once those details are handled, all that’s left is faxing offer sheets to Marchand and Bennett. In turn, both of them will drive all night so that they can be standing outside 50 Bay St. on the morning of July 1, holding boom boxes over their heads, playing Peter Gabriel. Then the Leafs win the Stanley Cup. Fade out.
One wrinkle in this story is motivation. Why would Brad Marchand agree to play in Toronto? He’s from Nova Scotia. He knows that Toronto is fun for a dirty weekend, but he doesn’t want to live here.
Everything that makes Marchand alluring – the wit, the provocations, the licking – would be hammered flat in this market. Overnight, it would go from “What a scamp” to “Is this corruption of the youth wrong, and how do we pass a bylaw to stop it?”
You want to play hockey for a living? We have that. You want to have fun while you do it? Spend an hour watching raw interview footage following any Leafs’ game, and then go elsewhere. It’s a dreary franchise staffed by dreary types. Brad Marchand would show up for two months and end up postdating his retirement to last year.
And Bennett? People seem to think he can be had for the price of a cut-rate William Nylander.
That’s because he is currently discussing depressed Florida prices. Now we’d be talking Toronto prices.
How did Bennett end up in Florida? He was traded there by Leafs GM (then Calgary GM) Brad Treliving for Emil Heineman and a second-round pick.
Aaron Ekblad of the Florida Panthers celebrates with the Stanley Cup.Christian Petersen/Getty Images
Bennett just scored 15 goals in the playoffs. Nylander has also scored 15 goals in the postseason, but it took him four years.
Why would Bennett, Conn Smythe Trophy winner, agree to come work for the guy who thought he was worth one-and-a-half mediocre Swedes so that he can make less money than a third Swede who has been stealing money from the Maple Leafs for the last decade?
Bennett seems like a pretty cold fish – that’s part of his brilliance – but underneath that blank stare, there must also be an ego.
Then there’s the frantic market. Bennett brains a guy in Florida, no one cares. He could come out of the rafters and elbow the team owner in the head and it wouldn’t make the papers, because there are no papers. Up here, the next time he decides to ruin someone’s ability to pick up their grandchildren when they’re in their 60s, they will sound the horn of sports radio doom, and keep blowing it for a month.
Bennett’s from around these parts – Holland Landing, Ont. He knows what’s what. Which is why he isn’t coming.
By the time the Leafs get to Ekblad, he’ll already have done the smart thing and re-signed with the best-run franchise in the NHL.
There are no plug-and-play options for the Leafs. There never have been, and never will be.
If they want to weasel their way out of the jam they’ve created for themselves, they’ll have to do it the hard way – by using every bit of that cunning they haven’t shown an iota of in the last 50 years.