Toronto Maple Leafs: An Indictment of Ridiculous Hockey Narratives

The Toronto Maple Leafs recently signed Joe Thornton.

Now, Joe Thornton is 41 years old, and despite that, he is only two years away from being one of the NHL’s best players.

You might forget that he can actually play given the absolutely brain-numbing nonsense about leadership that surrounds his signing.  Sure, that played a part, I have no doubt.  But the guy can still play.

The Leafs signed him because for the league minimum they get a hall of famer who has over 1000 career points and who will no doubt be good for their young team.  Yes, they also get some leadership, but the amount of paper dedicated to the topic makes me want to puke.

Leadership in hockey has to be the dumbest thing we talk about.  Sure, it exists, but since you are not in the dressing room and do not personally know the players, its a spurious concept, at best.  At worst, its just a lazy narrative used to sell newspapers.

You can’t measure it.  There is no standard definition of it.  It is an abstract concept applied to explain things that happen, because no one wants to hear about how two evenly matched teams having  game decided by luck, injuries or both.   Its easier to provide LEADERSHIP is a reason for failure because its abstract nature makes it difficult for anyone to say that you’re wrong.

It is a problem that permeates all professional sports analysis, but more specifically, I read two articles  this weekend, both from legacy media, that argued that the signing of Thornton amounted to “an indictment” of the team’s current leadership, which is such a lazy, brain numbing narrative that it is offensive.

Toronto Maple Leafs and Joe Thornton

The Leafs have not been able to get out of the first round, which sounds bad, unless, you know, you put it into context. It is far easier to blame an abstract concept than to acknowledge that building a team is an inexact science that does not always produce linear results.  That results of hockey games are based on many factors, including random luck.

Year 1:  Team goes from last place to the playoffs.  Show well against Washington Capitals, a model of an NHL team in the salary cap era.

Year 2: League’s youngest team plays league’s best team to within a game of upset, despite a suspension to one of their best players and the fact the favorite here had been building their team for a decade.

Year 3: Despite another Kadri suspension, Leafs outplay the Bruins and get unlucky. Bruins go on to Cup Finals.

Year 4: Two different goalies go on 50+ save streaks in a five-game series, posting a mathematically improbable 98% 5v5 save percentage.  Muzzin gets hit from behind, the player who hits him isn’t suspended and scores a hat-trick the next game.  Leafs are the far superior team, get unlucky.

Despite the (mostly) unlucky results, this Toronto Maple Leafs team is still one of the NHL’s youngest teams, and their regular season on-ice statistics under their new coach put them as one of the NHL’s top five teams.  As much as everyone wants a Miami Heat Insta-Team, in reality it’s a process.

I mean, isn’t one of the biggest clichés in hockey that you have to learn how win? Sure, if you only look at the point totals, you can make an argument about the Leafs regressing.  But if you actually look at the statistics that have large sample size, and if you have an understanding that even results after 82 games are highly susceptible to variance at the pro level, you can clearly see this team is progressing.  

You can’t seriously look at any of their playoff losses and blame them on leadership.  It’s the stupidest idea I have ever heard.  When John Tavares hit the post on a tap-in that would have tied game five against Columbus, it was not a lack of leadership that caused him to hit the post.

No amount of leading was going to get Jake Muzzin out of the damned hospital, or prevent Jonas Korpisalo from channeling the powers of 1986 Patrick Roy.

To suggest otherwise shows a complete lack of understanding about how hockey works.

Yes, Joe Thornton will add leadership to this lineup, but that doesn’t mean that John Tavares, Jason Spezza, Morgan Rielly and Auston Matthews weren’t already doing so.  Tell me, when the Lightning missed the playoffs and were upset in the first round in between two trips to the Stanley Cup Final with (more or less) the same roster, did they somehow lack leadership in the years where they were unlucky?  Does that even make sense?

Why can’t the media just praise the Leafs when they deserve it? They made a good move.  It isn’t necessary to say they made a good move, but its an indictment of all their other moves?  That is so lazy, and utterly ridiculous.

The Leafs had a problem: Their coach (the guy who these exact same writers claim was providing tons of leadership) mentally abused at least one of his players and employed outdated strategies from the 1990s.  The Leafs fired him. I don’t recall anyone writing that hiring Sheldon Keefe was an indictment of Lou Lamoriello for thinking Mike Babcock was a good coach, which it actually was.

Ironically, If Babcock had deployed Marleau as the fourth-liner he was, and not the hall of famer he used to be, the Leafs might have already won a series.  Again though, that doesn’t have anything to do with leadership, just bad coaching.

Joe Thornton will add a lot more to the Toronto Maple Leafs than just leadership. He’s still a hell of  a hockey player, and if that wasn’t true, they’d have signed him as an assistant coach.  If Joe Thornton wanted to play on any other team, that team would have signed him.  Is that an indictment of the other 30 team’s leadership abilities?

Couldn’t Thornton choosing the Leafs be seen as an endorseement of their team, management and leadership group?  You know, the one that helped court him.

Give me a break.  The Toronto Maple Leafs may or may not have good leadership on their team. I don’t go in their dressing room or personally know any of their players, so I don’t know. But I do know that “leadership” is a convenient and lazy narrative that gets applied post-hoc based on results that are a lot more complicated than who was able to give the best speech.

Hockey analysis has come a long way in the last ten years, and its about time the legacy media caught up.