The team didn’t release a picture of me sleeping in a Maple Leafs blanket when I was traded to Toronto in the mid-’90s, but it wouldn’t have been that hard to find one if they had asked.
For Mitch Marner, John Tavares and many others before us, our childhood dreams weren’t just about making the NHL or winning a Stanley Cup. We wanted to do it with the Leafs, the Cup-starved team we grew up cheering for.
Tie Domi’s first words to me after I arrived in the dressing room were: If we win the Cup here “they’d break off the city at Yonge and Dundas Streets and it would fall into Lake Ontario.”
But something happens to all of us in between the first and last time we put on the blue-and-white jersey. Losing changes everything, and we can all become a little jaded.
And really, how can we not? A golden opportunity feels like it’s become lost in the blink of an eye. I felt it in 1998, Carlo Colaiacovo probably felt it in 2008, as well as Wayne Simmonds last season. And undoubtedly, Marner and Tavares are feeling closer to it today.
While they are both under contract for one more season at around $11 million (U.S.) each, the writing is on the wall. Their chapters as local Leafs players will soon come to an end.
On Friday, when newly appointed MLSE CEO Keith Pelley, Leafs president Brendan Shanahan and general manager Brad Treliving speak to the media, it’s fully expected that they’ll be aligned on the team’s short-term plans to get this runaway train back on the rails.
Unlike in years past, it will come with a different tone that no longer supports the idea of the Core Four.
Marner is now expendable because of what it will take to re-sign him, while it’s time for Tavares to go due to his diminishing role. These factors will be the driving force in why the Leafs will be seeking trades for these two as early as this June’s draft.
Both players have full no-movement clauses that they can exercise until they are free agents after next season, but what’s the point of waiting? If the Leafs can find Marner a destination where he’s willing to go and his new team has the means to sign him to a long-term contract with an annual salary he can’t refuse, then why delay the inevitable?
Here is the good news for Marner: there are already multiple NHL teams that have reached out and shown a keen interest in a three-time all-star player who closes in on 100 points every season. And that’s with the knowledge that his next contract could land him as much as $100 million.
With Friday’s press conference set to push the narrative that the team is still very much in a position to win now, this is the fastest, most legitimate chance the Leafs have to bring back the salary-cap balance needed to reinforce their defence and goaltending.
But for this to really work, it’s imperative that every decision is cunning and calculated with no margin for error. They can’t miss like Kyle Dubas did with the Nazem Kadri trade in 2019, or Treliving did with the Matthew Tkachuk trade as GM of the Flames in 2022.
Trading an elite, skilled forward still very much in his prime has to restock the barren cupboards.
If all goes according to plan, the Leafs will easily jump into the deep end of the free-agent pool this summer, where their eyes are already focused on defencemen Chris Tanev, Brandon Montour and Brett Pesce. Landing not one but two of these unrestricted free agents is imperative.
As far as Tavares goes, it’s not an easy job to tell your captain and a veteran of 1,109 NHL games that the contract he was given no longer works here and arrangements to move elsewhere will need to be made.
Finding a taker for Tavares’ services wouldn’t come with the same anxiety of off-loading Patrick Marleau’s $6.25-million contract to the Hurricanes in 2019. That conditional first-round pick handed to Carolina ended up being Seth Jarvis, who had 33 goals and 67 points this season.
The Leafs could pay Tavares his $7-million signing bonus owed on July 1, and many aspiring playoff teams would gladly take the NHL veteran for one year at that sizable discount.
There will likely be a reluctance for Tavares to waive his no-move clause in his hometown, but that feeling is usually followed with a reluctance to stay in a place that you are no longer wanted.
When he was signed to a seven-year deal in 2018, Tavares was asked what it would mean to help bring a Stanley Cup to Toronto for the first time since 1967.
“I mean, it’s hard to put that into words, right? People have been waiting for that for a long time, people are hungry for it,” he said at the time, offering no guarantees.
Tavares and Marner had hoped to be the hometown heroes but have just one playoff series victory in six seasons on a team that never had the right balance from Day 1. Now it’s time to wake up from that childhood dream.
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