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Long Walk in the NHL Desert

Like a lot of enlightening moments, mine came to me at the oddest of times. I was overseas in Germany in the spring of 2001, desperately trying to find a venue to watch the Leafs play the New Jersey Devils in a conference semifinal playoff matchup. I was covering the men’s world hockey championship, a work trip that sounded agreeable in theory, but in practice it was proving painful and not particularly lucrative. It was also conflicting directly with the NHL playoffs.

Done work for the night, I was winding my way through a collection of back streets that were notable for their medieval feel and the Second World War bomb damage that was still faintly visible on some of the buildings. The time difference between Europe and North America would let me watch the pivotal Game 5 of the Leafs–Devils series if I could only locate the bar where it was alleged it was to be shown. During my search, I began to realize that my meandering had taken me to an area near Hanover’s main train station to a small neighbourhood bathed in the dull glow of red lights. I had ended up in the area reserved for the city’s houses of ill repute.

Visible through a floor-to-ceiling window in front of me, I saw a middle-aged man bound and gagged. Beside him was, to use a word of my father’s generation, a buxom blonde woman who could be no other nationality but German. As I watched, she began whipping the hapless man. Worse, she seemed to be enjoying it.

I’m not sure what he thought — he had a leather mask on — but I presume that, given that the whole episode was taking place in full view of people walking by, he had elected to be subjected to this public humiliation.

I still recall thinking “What on God’s green earth could be the point of such an exercise?” and “How could it possibly be enjoyable for either of them?” But then it hit me: I was a Leafs fan going to extraordinary measures to try to find the game on television in a faraway land. Ultimately I knew, or ought to have known, the result would leave me asking similar questions of myself. It may not involve being clad in leather restraints, but the invisible shackles of my addiction were just as emotionally painful.

In the complicated world of team/fan relations, the Leafs don’t use a device normally reserved for four-legged beasts of burden; instead, their method of inflicting pain on its followers could be better described as death by a thousand cuts. That’s what it’s been akin to — a lifetime of anticipation, a bit of teasing, oftentimes utter incompetence, and, ultimately, failure. There have been reasons to be optimistic. Until the long post-lockout run of playoff misses, the Leafs could be called the most successful Canadian team in the era that ran from the 1992–93 season, which is generally assumed to be about the point that hockey started to undergo a massive transformation, until the spring of 2004, before the work stoppage.

Calling the Leafs the best Canadian team in that span does require a small leap of faith because the Montreal Canadiens won the 1993 Stanley Cup and both the Calgary Flames and Vancouver Canucks came within a game of doing the same in 2004 and 1994 respectively. The Leafs also missed the playoffs twice during that time, but that was hardly a rare event for Canadian teams, who all struggled to a degree keeping up to hockey’s changing economics. But, on balance, I would say that Toronto was the best Canadian team during that span because the Leafs did make it to the conference final four times. The club was generally assumed to be a good bet to win at least one playoff round every year it did make the playoffs. Not an impeccable record of success, but not table scraps either.

The time since the NHL lockout ended in 2005 has been an inexcusable failure because the Leafs can’t make the post-season. Their record during the 1980s and early 1990s was about the same, and often worse, though the masses kept pouring into Maple Leaf Gardens just like they do now at Air Canada Centre.

So, in the wider view, since 1967 they haven’t exactly been Three Stooges bad because of the ten-or-so years of competence, but also nowhere near the rarefied air they occupied up until they last won the Stanley Cup. The problem is that I don’t remember those halcyon days when the Leafs more or less went blow-for-blow with the Montreal Canadiens. This is because I was still several years away from sucking in my first breath. You have to be about fifty years old to even remember a Leafs Stanley Cup win and older to have appreciated its significance at the time. The rest of us are left to grasp at small victories. And, boy, can we ever cling to those!

If loving the Leafs is like an addiction, then the four visits to conference finals since 1993 are the proverbial crack houses. The last one came in 2002, and if I allow myself to dream, it was like it was yesterday. The Leafs played twenty games over a period of six weeks and had to fight tooth-and-nail for everything as the team was decimated by injuries and came up against two very determined squads in the first two rounds. First it was the New York Islanders and then the Ottawa Senators, both of them falling to the Leafs in seven games. But the Leafs were ultimately stopped by the Carolina Hurricanes in six games in the Eastern Conference final.

Given the way the playoffs broke that year, it may have been the best opportunity the club would ever have to win the Stanley Cup. Top seeds Boston and Philadelphia had been eliminated in the first round and their nemesis the previous two post-seasons, New Jersey, also exited at that stage.

There is a saying in sports that it’s often not the teams you beat but the ones you don’t have to that determines championships. With that credo in mind, 2002 should have been the Leafs’ year. It wasn’t, of course, and as more time has passed, I’ve slowly grown to accept that perhaps the rest of the NHL had a point when the Leafs that season were referred to as the most hated team in the league.[1]

I don’t necessarily agree, but I now understand what riled others, particularly in other parts of Canada. Leafs winger Darcy Tucker had hands-down his best year as an NHL player, but he was also not afraid to push the boundaries too much and too often. His low-bridge hit on the Islanders’ Michael Peca in Game 5 of the first-round series was the perfect example of the Leafs’ penchant for just tickling the grey area between what was allowed and what shouldn’t be. The snapshot lives on as perhaps the best modern-day example of what ails the Leafs. Tucker, a player of reasonable ability, but also one with some flaws, going low on Peca was cheap, plain and simple. Replays then, as they do now, clearly showed Tucker looking to the referee right after making contact to see if he was going to be penalized. Players who honestly believe they’ve done nothing wrong generally don’t glance back to see if they’ve been caught.

Pictures from that game involving Tucker and Peca also show a disturbing sign that has remained a bugaboo for the Leafs franchise: acres of empty seats in the lower platinum section, even though it was an intense and important playoff game. Then, as now, the well-moneyed areas of the ACC are full of people who didn’t seem too bothered watching all the action, no matter how critical the game may be.

It’s no small asterisk that Peca never played another game that series: the Tucker hit ended his season. Peca and Tucker later patched things up when Peca came to Toronto, a nice gesture by both men.

But the run ended for the Leafs that year in one of those split-second blurs that so often define playoff hockey. Alex Mogilny, with eight goals scored that post-season, helped allow one in overtime that would kill the Leafs season. He let Carolina Hurricane forward Martin Gelinas walk to the Leafs net, where Gelinas took a pass from teammate Josef Vasicek,[2] and then deposited the puck behind Leafs goaltender Curtis Joseph.

That was it. That night, as I left the Wheat Sheaf Tavern just up the road from the ACC — I had feverishly tried to get tickets for the game but the prices were approaching several hundred dollars a seat — I distinctly recall thinking that the Leafs had made the final four on four occasions over the past ten years. It wouldn’t be long before they would be back. Right?

Since that day in 2002 the Leafs have won just one playoff series. What constitutes success these days is the hope that they are still in the playoff chase come late March. It has not been easy to be a Leafs fan in the decade since that warm spring night in Toronto. Even back then, loving the Leafs meant being in bed with the team that was the most hated in the NHL, or so went the prevailing wisdom of the day.

I can only wonder that if the Leafs had behaved a bit more honourably that season and in others leading up to it, fate would have been kinder to the hockey club and its long-suffering fans. Looking back, I do believe the label was somewhat unfair (just as I’m sure Vancouver Canucks’ fans think a similar tag their team has inherited recently is unjust). Respected hockey man Pat Quinn was the Leafs’ coach and general manager at the time and he was also the man behind the bench of Team Canada at the Salt Lake City Olympics and later the 2004 World Cup and 2006 Turin Olympics. If Wayne Gretzky, in charge of Team Canada, installed Quinn as his coach, then surely the Leafs couldn’t be nearly as bad as some of the worst parts of their reputation suggested.

I also used to cringe at the characterization that Leafs fans treated even small victories as though they were steps on the path to planning a Stanley Cup parade. The decade-long run of reasonable success really did give Leafs fans a sense of entitlement, an expectation that things would not only stay the same but that they would likely get even better. Back in 2002, I, like pretty much all my Leafs Nation brethren, thought that the numerals 1-9-6-7 signified Canada’s Centennial year. I’m not sure I even think about Canada’s 100th birthday when I see “1967” written anywhere now. I know precisely what it means: the last Stanley Cup victory for the Leafs.

Lost in the desert of missed playoffs and early springs, Leafs fans now grasp wins in pretty much the same way as their detractors used to say they did way back when, when all those unseemly comments really weren’t true. The Leafs won an average of thirty-four games in the five seasons between the fall of 2007 and the spring of 2012. If you extend that period back two additional years to include the first seven seasons since the NHL lockout wiped out the 2004–05 season, the number nudges up to an average of thirty-six wins per year. Those stats, especially the number from the past five years (because it’s more reflective of the Brian Burke managerial regime) really hits home. Most people who are gainfully employed get paid every two weeks. That means twenty-six times a year. The comparison struck me because a Leafs victory now really does feel like payday, that’s how rarely it happens.

I’m not sure fans need the Leafs to win the Stanley Cup to make all this longing fade away. The NHL, like all the professional sports leagues, is an incredibly difficult milieu to cast your lot in. There are thirty teams, and only one wins the championship each year. Former Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment head Richard Peddie used to shamelessly exploit this fact to justify the Leafs’ lack of success. What Peddie ignored is the one simple thing that Leafs fans want, and that’s a chance to feel good again. Make the playoffs, win a round or two, make spring synonymous with playoff hockey again. Those four springs in Toronto — 1993, 1994, 1999, and 2002 — when the Leafs made it to the penultimate round made everyone feel alive. Of course, you wished it lasted a bit longer, but Toronto was gripped with a belief, a feeling that was in the air. It was as if the warm spring air was somehow connected to the hockey team; as if the Leafs were helping us breathe. Everyone, even those who wouldn’t know a hockey puck from a grapefruit, believed in the Leafs. Get to that stage often enough and the Leafs will eventually win the Stanley Cup and the numerals 1-9-6-7 will go back to meaning Canada’s Centennial.

I believed back in 2001 in Germany, as well. I eventually found that bar in Hanover and watched as the Leafs took on the New Jersey Devils in an Eastern Conference semifinal series. Tomas Kaberle scored the winner with less than a minute left in the game. The result put the Leafs in control with a three-games-to-two lead heading back to Toronto.

I wound my way back to my guesthouse in Hanover, wanting to tell the first person I saw on those deserted streets how happy I was. I didn’t care that they would have been German and likely didn’t give two shakes of lederhosen about a hockey game taking place across the Atlantic Ocean, especially since the world championship was going on in the city. It was middle-of-the-night late and even the bawdy houses were closed down, not that the pleasure on offer in them could have approached what I was feeling as I skipped back to my room.

A few days later, with the Devils having won Game 6 to tie the series at three games apiece, I arrived back in Toronto literally an hour before the puck drop in the decisive seventh. My then-girlfriend, now-wife, scooped me up at the airport and we drove straight to a sprawling sports bar in Toronto’s west end to watch the game. Things were looking good when Steve Thomas scored to give the Leafs a 1–0 lead — I’m not sure the world could have been a better place. On this warm night in May the Leafs were on the verge of winning a playoff series that would have meant they were one of just four teams vying for the Stanley Cup.

You know what happened next. Thomas’s goal was the last one of that Leafs season as the Devils poured in four in the second period on their way to a 5–1 win.

The pain seared through me. All I could think about was that guy in the window a few days earlier.