No Hope for the Leafs

Damnit, Toronto, this is why you can't have nice things.

Longtime readers, or anyone acquainted with a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, will wearily recognize the kind of stubborn, pointless hope the fan base exudes every fall like clockwork. Every year, we Leaf fanatics don blue-and-white glasses, examine the team, and proclaim all sorts of Unassailable Reasons Why This Will Be Our Year. Not the year we win a Cup--even the most delusional of us won't trot that out without a brewery full of beer in us--but the Year We Make The Playoffs And Then, You Know, ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN.

It occurs to me that my personality is oddly suited to being a Laffs fan. For way too long I've aspired to mediocrity, and I've got that exaggerated hope/crashing despair thing down to a fine art. The team has managed to outdo me these last two seasons, though. First, two years ago, there was an unexpected playoff appearance (PLAYOFFS OMGWTFBBQ) and they actually pushed tbe eventual Stanley Cup finalists to a seventh game and were up 4-1 with seven minutes to go in that game. I will never forget that. I had French class that night, and I managed to get the score off a classmate at the end of that class..."It's 4-1," she told me..."oops, no, wait, 4-2 now".
"It'll be tied by the time I get home", I prophesied. Sure enough, I arrived home just in time to see the winning goal go in. I was thus spared the meltdown that Leaf fans everywhere had endured.
The following season, something awfully similar happened on a larger scale. The team flew out of the gate, defying everyone in hockey by winning games they had no business winning. They'd be routinely outshot, sometimes 2 to 1, and still win. Rope-a-dope hockey. It was insane. The stats heads kept shaking those stats out of their heads and explaining how this couldn't possibly be sustained...and it kept being sustained. They were at or near the top of their division for a goodly chunk of last season, slipped a bit around the two-thirds mark, but were solidly in playoff position with 68 games gone in an 82 game season. All they needed to do was win half of those last fourteen games, and they'd have been in.

They won two.

Two.

What truly amazed me was the Leaf braintrust's bumbling lack of answers for the collapse. Any hockey fan could tell at a glance what was wrong: everything. The team had no defensive system. Literally none. Unlike every other team in the league, they played three lines instead of four, ensuring everyone on those three lines would be thoroughly gassed by the three quarter point of the season. They famously didn't care about opposition shots on net, and thus gave up a historical number of shots against; Jonathan Bernier saw more rubber than a whorde of prostitutes. Players were misused all over the ice, players that never should have been on the ice were (see McLaren, Fraser and Orr, Colton). The result was a slow-motion train wreck that was as predictable as it was mesmerizing.

After watching that, Leaf fans could perhaps be forgiven for burning their jerseys. This summer, though, the entire hockey world stood up and took notice of the doings in Toronto.

They promised a "culture change". That tired phrase has been thrown around entirely too many times in this fan's tenure, and to be quite honest, I put zero stock in it when I saw the same brain-dead coach who presided over last year's mess not only retained, but extended. More empty words, I thought. Sounds just like what Tim Leiweke came in preaching last year. 

Tim Leiweke. He arrived in Toronto with a bang, spouting off about Stanley Cup parade routes (and causing the entire hockey world to convulse in paroxysms of helpless laughter; the running joke for years was that the Leafs and their fans "plan the parade" after every trade and every four game winning streak). He also announced he was going to take all the franchise's memorabilia off the walls of the Air Canada Center. His reasoning--entirely reasonable reasoning, from my vantage point--was that the Leafs rely too much on past (ancient past) glories. The last Stanley Cup winners are in wheelchairs and walkers at this point, but they're all brought out every other game for a pointless ceremony marking the eleventy-fifth season since the Leafs were relevant. But  Leaf Nation reacted to Leiweke's musing as if he were a filthy Hab, and he backed off and turned his attention to the other franchises under MLSE's control.

In here is a pretty good summary of what he's done. The summary of the summary is that thanks to his connections and cachet, two laughingstock teams (Raptors and TFC) either made the playoffs for the first time in a long time or will make them for the first time ever. And neither playoff appearance is of the "one-and-done" variety, but what truly looks like the first taste of a prolonged period of success--possibly championship success.

The Leafs, though. The flagship franchise was floundering, as it had floundered forever and an age, and there had been entirely too many empty calls for "culture change". Last time it was called 'Blue-and-White Disease' and much effort had been made to excise it from the team. It didn't really work, because nobody changed the overall direction of the franchise. For years they've been hockey's version of that crazy uncle you've got who insists at the top of his lungs that he knows best, that the rest of the world is full of shit, even as he screws his life up at every turn.  

Hockey is just starting down baseball's path to statistical overload. Give it twenty years and the announcers will be telling you that Nathan Mackinnon has a 13.5% shooting average from zones five through seven on nights when the moon is a waning crescent. But for now, we're still figuring out what these 'advanced stats' things are good for. Every team's been hopping on the bandwagon, because there's a hard salary cap and any off-ice edge you can possibly get might translate to the ice itself.

Every team except the Toronto Maple Leafs. Stats? We doan NEED no friggin' stats! Look at howwell our team performed for two thirds of a season without them! And that last third, well, we have no answer for that, and we're not going to listen to no smartass accountant types with answers, either, because we KNOW HOCKEY, damnit! We've won more Stanley Cups than almost every other team! 

(Which is true, believe it or not. Only Montréal has won more Cups. Mind you, as every Leaf fan knows because every Leaf hater takes great pains to remind him, the Leafs haven't even competed for the Cup since 1967.)

Lieweke stood back and analyzed this for a while. Then he brought in Brendan Shanahan, a highly respected player-turned-less-respecred-NHL-disciplinarian who had zero experience running an NHL team.  The cynics (count me among them) laughed. They chortled when Randy Carlyle's assistants were fired and Carlyle himself was kept on.
And then the chortles and guffaws and squeals of glee began to dry up in a myriad of throats. True, Toronto hadn't hit any home runs. But they'd managed to swap out their bottom six for players who were, according to those meaningless advanced stats, better and cheaper. For less than the market value of one Dave Bolland, they got three players, one of which is almost certainly going to outpoint Bolland this year. Their bottom six, which was far and away the worst in the league last season, suddenly looks at least defensively competent and even has a little pop in its sticks. This will in turn mean that Carlyle can confidently roll four lines, which means that the first line won't hit a wall at the 60 game mark. And while Carlyle's still there, the two new assistants breathing down his neck are (a) a defensive guru known for his work with the Nashville Predators, one of the NHL's better defensive teams and (b) last year's Marlie coach, who took a team of nobodies well into the playoffs. Should the Leafs falter out of the gate, the money is on Spott or Horachek to be coach by American Thanksgiving.
And one of the new GMs, Shanahan's hire, is Kyle Dubas. I don't know Dubas from a dumbass, but I have enormous respect for how Shanahan said he conducted the search. He surveyed his contacts league wide to find out who the best young mind in the game was, and Dubas's name kept coming up, over and over. So he hired him.

That's the sign of a good boss. He knows what he doesn't know, he looks far and wide for who might know it, and he gets him. Dubas, incidentally, is a huge proponent of the advanced statistics the Leafs had long disdained. And lo and behold, all of a sudden the Leafs have an analytics department, staffed by some real heavy hitters. Sane deal: ask any stathead what the best hockey stats site is, and you'll get TheExtraSkater.com more often than not. Well, you won't anymore, because the Leafs hired its creator, took the website down and made all the information on it proprietary.

The other new GM, named Pridhim, is the team's new "capologist", tasked with finding loopholes in the collective bargaining agreement while keeping the team in compliance with it. His last job? He basically did the same for the NHL as a whole. Doubtless Shanahan knew Pridhim well from his lasy job. Connections. It's all about connections.

That's how you run a hockey team. Even the most ardent Leaf hater has had to admit this off-season has looked good for Toronto.

No, I'm not going to suggest this means the Leafs are a playoff team. They're a bubble team at best, one Phil Kessel torn ligament or Bernier groin pull away from a lottery pick. But at least and at long last, they're on the right road.  So, hope, right?

Not so fast.

Tim Leiweke, the man who set all this in motion and the man to whom anybody on three teams who is anybody owes his job, is leaving.
Not immediately, but soon. June, at the latest.
We may never hear the real reason(s) why Leiweke would desert a five year contract less than halfway through. But we can speculate. The rumours run from his wife hating Toronto winters (they're Los Amglenos and can therefore be forgiven), to bigger and better opportunities beckoning (where?!) to the one I tend to favour: Leiweke's already sick of being a puppet torn between two sets of bosses.

Bell and Rogers, two huge Canadian media conglomerates, own Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. The American equivalent would be Comcast and Verizon jointly owning a majority share of  the Yankees, the Knicks, the Rangers and Madison Square Garden, among a bunch of other things. You can imagine how unstable that would be: like old nitroglycerin. How and why it was allowed is a mystery for the ages.  At any rate, anyone caught in the boardroom quakes that must being going on at MLSE would surely long for stable ground somewhere.

Replacing him won't be easy. Actually, replacing him will be impossible, as Cathal Kelly notes in the article linked above. Nobody else in sports or entertainment brings Leiweke's connections or his force of will.  Leaf, Raptor and TFC fans had better hope that everything can run on its own, once Tim is gone.

I, frankly, doubt it.