Hope and Heartbreak in Toronto. Peter Robinson

in the hell is he getting his gear from?

      Not only did it happen, it happened twice for Murphy.

      Sitting in that sweltering Bali bar in the midday heat, I allowed myself dark moments of anger just recalling their names. At the time they were still two playoff rounds away from sipping champagne together out of the Stanley Cup, but the foreboding was thick in my mind.

      It remains one of the great confounding mysteries how two men were so despised in the centre of the hockey universe where they both grew up, only to travel a relatively short distance down Highway 401, over the Ambassador Bridge, and suddenly ceased being, well, useless.

      Scotty Bowman really is a genius.

      Bowman was not involved in what followed a little more than a decade later, but Hal Gill also offered an interesting study in how a guy can spend large amounts of time in Toronto looking, well, like a taller version of Macoun sans moustache. Gill was a likable enough guy. Towering over everyone — 6’7”, 250ish pounds — he moved precisely as you would expect someone of those dimensions would. Brought in by John Ferguson Jr. in 2006 to try to upgrade a team that had missed the playoffs the previous year for the first time since the fire sale that saw both Murphy and then Macoun leave, there was no way the lumbering Gill was going to somehow transform himself into something he had never been up to that point in his almost decade-long NHL career. But don’t tell that to Leafs fans. Gill wasn’t so much disliked in Toronto as he was discounted. When you’re playing for a bad team — and this precise point could have applied to Macoun ten years earlier — steady, yeoman’s work at the back end isn’t appreciated. It’s especially not appreciated when your one enduring image is that of a hulking beast helplessly chasing faster opposition forwards in your own zone. Gill was a taller version of Macoun without the cross-checks.

      To be fair, Gill did okay killing penalties and taking a regular shift, but he sometimes handled the puck as though it was a hand grenade. Though even the very best defencemen are bound to make the occasional bobble in their own zone, Gill’s share of them seemed to come only in the games that the Leafs desperately needed to win — like the one on December 5, 2006, against the Atlanta Thrashers, when Gill wore the goat horns in a game that the Leafs should have won easily. The Leafs were up 2–0 heading into the third period against a team that was showing signs of slowly breaking out of its expansion funk but certainly wasn’t there yet. The Thrashers scored five third-period goals, taking a pin to the fragile air of anticipation inside the Air Canada Centre. The eventual 5–2 loss saw Gill managing a gaggle of giveaways and ill-timed penalties. From my seat in the first row of the greens, my despair was broken up by a little boy of about seven or eight nudging me out of the way in order to lean over the balcony with two thumbs down while booing the Leafs.

      The lumbering Gill continued to trudge around his own zone for little more than a year before he was dealt by Cliff Fletcher to the Pittsburgh Penguins for a second-round pick. Gill looked every bit as awkward in Pittsburgh but strangely was much more competent than in Toronto. He filled a solid depth role for the Penguins for the remaining season-plus he played there. His forty-four playoff appearances in Pittsburgh were two more than he had to that point in his career and exceeded by forty-four how many post-season games he played for the Leafs. Gill, like Macoun and Murphy before him, soon hoisted the Stanley Cup. For Gill, it came after his second season in Pittsburgh, and he’d even played a key role in the Pens getting to the final the previous year.

      Where does Craig Muni fit into this? Well, the Toronto native grew up around the same time as Macoun and Murphy. A year younger than those two, he was drafted by the Leafs twenty-fifth overall in 1980, twenty-one picks after Murphy was taken by the Los Angeles Kings (Macoun was passed over in the same draft). He never broke in with the Leafs, who instead were concentrating their efforts on ruining the careers of young defencemen Jim Benning and Fred Boimistruck, while others such as Jim Korn, Bob McGill, and Gary Nylund barely managed to escape Harold Ballard’s zoo with their careers intact. Lucky for Muni he played just nineteen games for the Leafs and was signed by the Edmonton Oilers in 1986. When he got to Edmonton he stepped right into a lineup that included Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, and Paul Coffey and which had just won its second consecutive Stanley Cup. Muni was part of the Oilers third and fourth straight triumphs and stayed on when Edmonton won another in 1990 without Gretzky, who had been traded to Los Angeles by that time.

      Muni, of course, wasn’t good enough to play for the Leafs in the 1980s, a time when they were one of the NHL’s worst teams. They let him go to Edmonton for nothing.

      And what did the Leafs get in return for dealing Murphy, Macoun, and Gill many years later? Alex Ponikarovsky is the only prospect or draft pick that even played for the team.

      6

      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