Toronto Maple Leafs: Broadcasters Crazy About William Nylander

The Toronto Maple Leafs star forwards William Nylander got off to a slow start after his holdout ended.

With fans already frustrated at the player for his hold out, the media covering the Toronto Maple Leafs focused heavily on his inability to score after his return to the lineup.

Many in the media were openly critical of Leafs GM Kyle Dubas for not playing hard ball.  (This never made sense to me.  He took it down to the wire and time will prove the deal is team friendly).

And overall, coverage of Dubas, Nylander, his contract and his early season play was uniformly negative.

Even when Nylander started to play well, because it wasn’t translating to points (Matthews and Kadri both went 12 games with a single goal each, at one point), hardly anyone noticed or cared.

It was more convenient to complain.

Sad State of Affairs

But then a funny (and completely predictable) thing happened: Nylander started playing like a star again.  He currently leads the Leafs in possession stats, is their best zone entry/exit player, and if you throw out his first month of play, he’s scoring at a 5v5 rate that is pretty much the same as Mitch Marner.

Oh and he took over for Nazem Kadri as a centre for eight games and showed that he’s fully capable of being a #1 centre in the NHL.

He was their best player in the month of February.

So what does the media do?  If you guessed “offer an accurate analysis of the player, praise him for getting back on track, and re-consider the ideas you had about trading him”  you would be 100% wrong.

This is Toronto son, get real.

First we have Sportsnet Analyst and noted horrible G.M Brian Burke talking about how the Toronto Maple Leafs will trade him in the summer.  Burke was on Prime Time sports and also said that Nylander isn’t worth his contract, which is just objectively false.

Nylander makes less than $7 million on the cap for the next five years after this one.  He’s already put up 2 x 60 point seasons, and in the second one was only a point or two outside of being a top ten NHL scorer at 5v5.   He hasn’t even hit his prime, and as the cap goes up and he improves, he’s going to have a very team friendly deal.

The odds of him getting traded are pretty much zero. Not only did Dubas make a point of saying that Nylander wouldn’t be traded, but trading players you’ve locked up for their entire primes just isn’t done.

Nylander is going nowhere.

Then last night, in the first intermission of a game where he’d already had several scoring chances and set Matthews up for a couple more, after scoring four points in his last two games and putting up eye-popping numbers after being reunited with Auston Matthews, CBC analysis Kelly Hrudey criticized him for having a good attitude.

That’s right – a good attitude.  It doesn’t matter that he completely turned his game around and is now playing like an elite player, that was completely ignored.  It didn’t matter that on the play in questioned he’d made an amazing move and got robbed by the goalie.

Nope.  The problem was that after wards…..he smiled.

The nerve.

No wonder fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs frequently talk about trading their star forward for a checking defenseman.  When the guy finally starts living up to his potential, it’s not even covered.  Just some old-guy nonsense about his attitude.

Apparently the cure for the Leafs troubles is everyone acting like a Raged up Sports-Bro.

If William Nylander really wants to take his game to the next level, he’s got to learn to Bo Jackson his stick over his knee.  And that’s just for starters.

Of course, to believe that, you’d have to have watched zero Leafs games in the last two months and completely ignore the fact that he’s one of their best players every single game.