Читать книгу Hope and Heartbreak in Toronto - Peter Robinson - Страница 11

International Wallflowers

It’s doubtful that many Toronto Maple Leafs fans gave either of the two separate events of Tuesday, December 14, 2010, a second thought. That night the Leafs beat the Edmonton Oilers on the road to record their second consecutive victory and twenty-eighth point of the season. It left the team with a 12–14–4 record, or roughly the same winning percentage the club could be expected to have during much of their prolonged walk through the wilderness in the post-lockout era.

But there was a significant event that did happen to two Leafs prospects earlier that day. It was symbolic of a malaise that has plagued the club for ages. Jesse Blacker and Brad Ross, both Leafs draft picks, were sent packing from the final evaluation camp of the Canadian world junior team. Blacker, a defenceman then playing for the Owen Sound Attack, and Ross, a pesky Portland Winterhawks forward, received the dreaded early-morning phone call in their hotel room that comes along with being cut. They were sent home during the first round of cuts after a few days of practices and intrasquad games at MasterCard Centre of Excellence, a west Toronto rink that, of all things, is also the Maple Leafs practice venue.

Two teenage prospects being let go from their World Junior team is no big deal, right? Maybe it’s not important if viewed in the context of that one year. But it becomes quite relevant when you take the wider view and realize how often the Leafs simply don’t measure up when it comes to hockey competitions such as the World Juniors, Olympics, and Canada/World Cups.

The World Juniors tends to be a good barometer of a prospect’s future because if a young player is on his way to becoming an elite professional, there is a very good chance that he will play in at least one World Junior Championship. Because the tournament is generally regarded as a tournament for nineteen-year-olds and players are typically drafted in the year they turn eighteen, their prime opportunity to play for their country comes in the season or two after they are selected by an NHL club. Therefore, the evaluation process that players go through to make their respective teams also serves as an unofficial report card on NHL clubs’ scouting departments.

Though not a hard-and-fast analysis, it’s a pretty good way to grade the job NHL teams are doing drafting players. And based on the results from the past twenty years, the Maple Leafs have not done well. There has been one exception in the relatively recent past — Halifax, 2003. Canada had a good team that year, eventually finishing second, losing 3–2 to Russia in the gold medal game — a fair result from a Canadian perspective, but also if you were a Leafs fan. The rights to five players who played key roles for Canada — Brendan Bell, Carlo Colaiacovo, Matt Stajan, Kyle Wellwood, and Ian White — were owned by the club. All five eventually made the Leafs roster over the next few seasons. In fact, both Colaiacovo and White could now be called quality NHL defencemen, though they became that type of player after leaving Toronto.

Aside from that one year, there remains another one when the Leafs were well represented by two different goaltenders, but the way things eventually shook out nullified any potential benefit. It was 2006 and the two best goaltenders at the World Junior that year belonged to the Leafs: Team Canada’s Justin Pogge and Finland’s Tuukka Rask. Eventually, Rask was dealt for Andrew Raycroft, and Pogge never developed into the solid NHL goaltender the Leafs thought he might. The Leafs general manager at the time, John Ferguson Jr., gambled that Pogge was the better of the two prospects and it blew up in his face. Go figure.

Aside from 2003 and 2006, the Leafs’ representation on the Canadian squad has been pretty thin. A cynic watching the action that took place in Alberta in 2012 could snicker and point out that Canadian defenceman Dougie Hamilton should have been Leafs property — he was selected by the Boston Bruins with one of the two first-round picks that Toronto sent to Beantown in the Phil Kessel trade.

And what about Leafs prospects playing for other nations? Well, it’s not much better. During the 2012 World Juniors played in Calgary and Edmonton, the Leafs had but a single prospect, Swedish defenceman Petter Granberg, a solid if unspectacular player who eventually won gold with the rest of his teammates. In fact, Granberg was on the ice when countryman Mika Zibanejad scored the overtime winner against Russia. As a result, Granberg’s image was widely shown on highlights and in newspaper and website pictures in the aftermath of Sweden’s first gold medal at the event in some thirty years. Zibanejad, who belonged to the Ottawa Senators, is a much brighter prospect, but at least Granberg was able to bask in the glow of his much more celebrated teammate.

In the past three decades of World Junior tournaments, Colaiacovo and Swedish defenceman Kenny Jonsson are the only elite World Junior performers whose rights were owned by the Leafs during the competition who remained with the Leafs to start their NHL careers. Jonsson, like Colaiacovo, became a very solid NHL player, but he, too, was traded away, in the move that brought Wendel Clark back to Toronto in 1996.

Two other defencemen whom the Leafs owned the rights to — Finn Janne Gronvall and Swede Pierre Hedin — played well enough to earn World Junior all-star honours at two different tournaments in the 1990s. But neither ended up playing regularly in the NHL. Hedin had his moments, but as a smallish, slick defenceman, he came along at a time when the NHL game, and especially Pat Quinn, the Leafs coach at the time, demanded much bigger players. After a year of playing on the Leafs’ AHL affiliate in St. John’s, no doubt puzzled at the Newfoundlanders’ accents just as much as the Leafs’ indifference at playing him on the big club, Hedin hightailed it back to Sweden. Not exactly the big one that got away, but Hedin’s story could have been different had he come along a few years later.

All told, if you accept the premise that the World Juniors tend to identify the best teenage hockey players in the world, the Leafs have acted like a middle-aged schoolteacher with little or no interest in the best and brightest pupils before him; at very least, they’ve done an incredibly bad job identifying them.

And that’s just the World Juniors. The Leafs’ contribution to other elite world hockey competition has been just as modest. The lone significant NHL tournament where the Maple Leafs had a wide representation was at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City when Toronto hit the proverbial mother lode: Curtis Joseph (Canada), Tomas Kaberle (Czech Republic), Alex Ponikarovsky (Ukraine), Robert Reichel (Czech Republic), Mikael Renberg, Mats Sundin, and Mikael Tellqvist (all Sweden) represented their respective countries; Alex Mogilny would have played for Russia had he not been hurt just before the NHL schedule broke for the Olympics. Aside from that rather impressive contingent, Maple Leafs’ involvement in other significant tournaments has been rather modest.

Of course, both Leafs and Team Canada fans of a certain age will never forget Paul Henderson’s Summit Series winner in 1972 or Darryl Sittler’s goal four years later in the Canada Cup. Both men played for Toronto at the time of those dramatic tournament-clinching goals.

Much has changed in the international arena since the 1970s; the world game is now a much more mature and different beast and it has left Leafs players largely out in the cold. The result? When a major competition is going on, Toronto fans can sit back and watch dreamy-eyed. Those taking part are almost assuredly not Maple Leafs.

Aside from the Henderson and Sittler examples cited above, the most memorable Canadian hockey moments of recent times are any combination of the three Canada Cup triumphs between 1984 and 1991 and the two Olympic gold medals won by the men’s team in 2002 and 2010. Non-Canadian triumphs in that era of note: the U.S. victory in the 1996 World Cup of Hockey and the Czech and Swedish triumphs at the 1998 and 2006 Olympics, respectively. Leafs involvement? Aside from Sundin’s pivotal role in Sweden’s long-overdue win, that sound you’re hearing is crickets (defenceman Aki Berg played for 2006 silver-medal winners, Finland).

Even the U.S. “Miracle on Ice” team, a squad that later sent so many players to the NHL after winning Olympic gold at Lake Placid in 1980, had nary a Leafs prospect on it.

But there is a quaint ritual that takes place at the Air Canada Centre after successful World Junior tournaments and also after the Salt Lake Olympics. It’s the honouring at centre ice of the returning Canadian heroes, gold medals draped around their necks. The glint from the gold baubles almost takes the sting from the salt in the wounds being felt as the players are introduced. On many occasions during Canada’s World Junior run of gold medals from 2005 to 2009, Leafs fans were even forced to endure more than a few young Canucks walking out to centre ice knowing full well that (1) this kid is going to be beating us some day (see Richards, Mike) and (2) prospects like these kids are what other teams have, not us.

But, like so much of the Leafs history, even when there are rare moments to celebrate, there is almost always an asterisk, a tinge of the bittersweet. For example, in 2002, when Curtis Joseph was honoured for returning from Salt Lake City with his Olympic gold medal, and then-Maple Leafs head coach Pat Quinn was likewise feted for his masterful job leading the boys wearing that other Maple Leaf to victory.

Mats Sundin never won a Stanley Cup, but he led Sweden to the 2006 Olympic gold medal. Sundin’s role in that victory is the most notable international performance by a Leaf since Darryl Sittler’s 1976 Canada Cup–winning goal.

Courtesy of Getty Images.

Joseph had been given the starter’s job in Salt Lake — a questionable move given the small matter of Martin Brodeur’s multiple Stanley Cup victories in New Jersey and the fact he had beaten Joseph the previous two springs in head-to-head playoff battles. Giving his netminder in Toronto the nod over a player as accomplished as Brodeur showed remarkable loyalty by Quinn. One problem: Cujo got funnelled almost from the moment the puck was dropped in the first game versus Sweden. The Swedes, chock full of their so-called golden generation, all in their prime in 2002, shook off an early allowed goal and made Canada look like, well, sorry Swedish hockey fans, Belarus.

The images of Sundin running roughshod over a Canadian team coached by Quinn and with Joseph in goal was about as surreal as hockey played in June at the ACC. Joseph, Quinn, and Sundin were the three key cogs in what was one of the best post-1967 Maple Leafs teams, and now they were opposing one another, with the Swedish captain helping turn Quinn’s exterior so red that the big Irishman appeared as if he was about to explode.

Curtis Joseph rarely became unhinged in Toronto, but he was also never comfortable in Team Canada’s net during the 2002 Olympics and lost the starting job. His performance likely hastened his exit from the Leafs.

Courtesy of Graig Abel.

It all worked out, of course. Canada found its stride a few days later, Sweden fell to the aforementioned Belarus, and Quinn eventually led the team to an extremely memorable gold medal win over the U.S. with Cujo firmly stuck to the bench and Brodeur between the pipes.

Back in Toronto, both men went to collect their congratulations, and the awkward moment at centre ice had the feeling of father and son running into each other in the coat check of a strip joint.

It wasn’t Quinn’s fault. He gave his guy a chance and he failed to do anything with it. When Brodeur was given his long-overdue opportunity, he ran with it and helped the country win its first men’s hockey gold in fifty years. Joseph? Though his character was never in question — the man has never lost his humble appeal — it was plainly obvious that if he could have kept his mask on that night, he would have.

In the end, the Leafs dispatched Carolina in the game following the ceremony — ironic, because it was precisely the same Hurricanes who defeated the Leafs in six games in the Eastern Conference final later that spring. Joseph played well both during the first game back and the rest of the season, but then left for greener pastures, signing with Detroit because he felt they offered him a better chance to win a Stanley Cup. Well, umm, of course, but Cujo never won a Cup in the Motor City like so many former Leafs had done previously.

And so there you have it. What should, or could have been a crowning moment for the Maple Leafs and their fans — celebrating an Olympic gold medal, the pursuit of which had gripped both the city and country for a fortnight — only hastened the exit of arguably the team’s best player; certainly its best puck-stopper in the post-1967 era. The prolonged melodrama that played out from March through to early July was a little like watching your cute ex-girlfriend leave town with an aging rock star because she couldn’t get along with your dad.

There was an instance of that niggling feeling of discord in the ACC on the night after another major competition. March 2, 2010, offered no touchstone moments in the history of the Toronto Maple Leafs franchise. But it did remind its fans how completely and utterly inferior the team was that year relative to the action that had taken place during the previous two weeks. The Vancouver Olympics were about as proud a moment not involving military action that Canada has ever felt. It was like celebrating New Year’s for seventeen consecutive days, the hangover part nicely taken care of by a bunch of golden Caesars that Canadian athletes kept on serving up.

The Leafs, of course, had an understated role in the events of the men’s hockey competition. The chief decision-makers for the Leafs, general manager Brian Burke and head coach Ron Wilson, had the same roles for the U.S. team. This was just as bizarre then as it seems now. If an alien had descended from outer space in the lead-up to the Games, he would have been excused for thinking that earthlings had an odd sense of fair play.

“Wait,” you could almost imagine an alien saying, “how come the head coach and the GM from one of the NHL’s worst teams are in charge of one of the best national teams? And the same two guys also run a Canadian NHL team even though they are American and putting together the American team at the biggest hockey event to ever take place in Canada?”

Well, yes, of course, and those two men did a fabulous job for their country. If only they could have replicated that success with their day jobs in Toronto (Wilson, we now know, paid with his job for not even coming close). Wilson — the memory must still haunt him — showed why he is considered a good hockey coach everywhere else but Toronto by leading the Americans to within a hair’s breadth of the gold medal. But, thank God, Canada prevailed.

Two days after the overtime final won by Canada 3–2, Wilson was back behind the bench for a Leafs home game versus — no kidding — Carolina again. Even if you don’t like Ron Wilson, you couldn’t fault him if he’d thought he had been kidnapped and placed behind the Leafs bench. He wasn’t, of course, and his personal coaching nightmare resumed in a Tuesday night encounter that will not be remembered for the ages. In Vancouver, Wilson had Zach Parise, Patrick Kane, Ryan Kesler, Bobby Ryan, and Ryan Suter at his disposal, along with many others of the world’s elite, including the best goaltender on the planet at the time in Ryan Miller. Back at his regular gig, Wilson had the luxury of Colton Orr, Jamie Lundmark, Freddy Sjostrom, Christian Hanson, and Garnet Exelby. Wilson must have felt like he had driven home in a Ferrari and woken up with a Ford Pinto in the garage.

The Leafs did their level best to make their coach and general manager feel right at home again, which is to say that they played like complete donkeys, losing 5–1 and eliciting a number of sarcastic barbs from Wilson to the media after the game. Under normal circumstances, the game was about as exciting as you would expect from a mid-week tilt between two non-playoff teams coming off a long break. When compared to events of the previous seventeen days, it was like seventeen years of uninterrupted white noise.

“Welcome home, coach. Are you happy to see that things haven’t changed?”

But the game had a modestly entertaining side story playing out while the Leafs were getting their hats handed to them. Ponikarovsky, who had played for the Ukraine two long-ago Olympic cycles earlier, was announced as one of the pre-game scratches. As much angst as Ponikarovsky contributed to the collective mindset of Leafs fans over the years — he never fulfilled the potential hung on him for almost a decade — it was clear something was up. The trade deadline loomed a couple days hence and the big Ukrainian’s pending free agent status after the season made him prime trade bait. A few fans in my section — 311 greens — were dutifully trolling the Internet on their hand-held devices to try to get a hint of any tangible action involving Ponikarovsky. It turned out the big lunk had been dealt to the Pittsburgh Penguins.

The return? A local kid named Luca Caputi.

Two days after watching the most thrilling Team Canada game of the modern era, talk suddenly switched to a trade involving a player who was a decade-long “what-if” as a Maple Leaf and a kid who, as it turned out, played just twenty-six games for them.

Only in Toronto.