Time Is Now for the Toronto Maple Leafs to Extend the Classiest Guy in the NHL

Ironically, it took giving up the captaincy for Toronto Maple Leafs now ex-Captain John Tavares to publicly demonstrate the leadership the team has privately said he's shown the entire time.

Toronto Maple Leafs fans are smart and savvy hockey fans, but even they don't know what they're talking about when they discuss a player's leadership. This isn't to imply that I do either. None of us who aren't in the the room know anything about the relationship a team's captain has with the players under him. Fans are left to credit leadership to winners.

If a player wins a Cup, he's automatically glorified as a great leaders. Otherwise, fans rarely get a glimpse of his leadership.

Yesterday was a notable exception to that.

Time Is Now for the Toronto Maple Leafs to Extend the Classiest Guy in the NHL

If there was any doubt about Tavares ability to lead, he put it to bed yesterday when he willingly handed off the captaincy to a younger, better player. Tavares is also scheduled to show up at the press conference and face questions about it.

Because of his robotic demeanor, Tavares isn't your typical rah-rah leader, but anyone whose worked with a quiet professional at the top of chosen art knows that leading by example is often just as effective, if not more so.

Tavares, for six years, has privately demonstrated that he is a great leader, and we know this because not one of a hundred different players to come and go during this time has ever said one single bad thing about this team, it's players or the atmosphere of the dressing room.

By all public accounts, the Toronto Maple Leafs have failed during Tavares' captaincy because they didn't win and hockey discourse exists trapped forever in the most frustrating, dumbest binary that there could be: Winning good, 31 other teams bad.

But privately, people who are able to see the forest for the trees are extremely impressed by the Maple Leafs over the last six years. It's the longest sustained streak of competitive hockey in the history of a one-hundred year old franchise and it took going 0-11 in elimination games, something so statistically improbable as to almost be a badge-of-honour, for them to be considered failures.

John Tavares is without a doubt one of the classiest, coolest guys to ever play for the Toronto Maple Leafs. His captaincy will be underrated in perpetuity because of the lack of results, but as he ironically and finally showed yesterday, at least in public, that he was and is a great leader.

The Toronto Maple Leafs need to immediately expected the classiest player in the history of their organization.