I say his mate because my mom would have never let my dad wear a moustache like that.”
Back before I had left on my trip, Macoun’s tendency to cross-check the living daylights out of opposing forwards had become even more painful for Leafs fans than it was for the unfortunate players on the receiving end of them. A good stay-at-home defenceman since arriving as part of the Gilmour trade in 1992, Macoun appeared to have made the decision to wear flippers instead of skates — he slowed down almost overnight. His laying the lumber on opponents was no longer oddly endearing. That’s because the cross-checks seemed to be coming more and more frequently just as the soon-to-be-injured opposition forward was scoring a goal.
The cross-checking just topped it all off. Back in Macoun’s time with the Leafs, a defenceman had to know the black art of using his stick for something other than shooting or passing. Macoun learned the craft perhaps better than any defenceman in the NHL and it was a central feature of his more than 1,100 games. It was an amazing run for a kid who grew up just north of Toronto and didn’t even get drafted by an NHL team.
By that point in his career, Macoun was so stay-at-home he barely crossed over centre ice into the opposition zone. It was also long before Movember made it acceptable for thirty days a year to adorn your upper lip with hair, especially when it lacked the charm of Lanny McDonald’s legendary ’tache. Despite winning a Stanley Cup with the Calgary Flames in 1989, Macoun was not an agreeable sight on the ice either, as his natural skating stride made him look like a disabled car heading for the exits of a demolition derby.
Your typical hockey fan, especially in Toronto, is generally not interested in the folly of blaming defencemen for all things bad when teams start to slip. That’s especially true when you’re talking about a man who isn’t exactly easy on the eyes. In fact, Macoun had the faint appearance of dressing up for Halloween but being caught equidistant between Tom Selleck and Ned Flanders.
That Macoun and Murphy became lightning rods for criticism was understandable, because fans tend to want to apportion blame when things aren’t going well. But the fact that so many out-of-favour Leafs moved on and often did very well when they appeared to be on their last legs in Toronto is a phenomenon that has had me screaming Craig Muni’s name since the late 1980s.
“Jamie Macoun is the worst defenceman in the NHL,” said a young kid of about seventeen beside me during my last game at the Gardens before I left on my trip. It was just one of thousands of comments I’ve heard from people around me in my time attending Leafs games. Most are instantly forgotten, but I’ve always remembered this particular barb because I had attempted to defend Macoun before the young man convinced me otherwise. That sentiment stuck with me and the negative thoughts never left me after watching live that night how much Macoun struggled to keep up with an Ottawa team that wasn’t exactly flush with talent.
Bali’s famous Arak drink tends to blur the lines between reality and fiction. That afternoon, watching the grainy television pictures of the three former Leafs well on their way to winning the Stanley Cup, I poured back the Arak to keep myself from crying. I was spurred on by the liberal amounts of beverage, the game, and Murphy, Macoun, and Rouse’s presence in it, and so I decided it was time for a mental overview of what had happened to the Leafs over the past two seasons since I had been away.
Burns’s long-ago firing had confirmed that the jig was up for that wonderful group of Leafs players that had gotten to two conference finals, even if I was still in denial before I left Canada. It’s perhaps logical that a few players are suddenly cast in the role of heel, as Macoun and Murphy were by the frustrated masses. But for one of the game’s greatest coaches, Scotty Bowman, to find a use for them, and then go on to win the Stanley Cup? Had you told the average Maple Leafs fan that night at the Gardens in 1996 that Macoun and Murphy were going to be hoisting hockey’s premier trophy over their heads, you would have been asked where you bought such effective medicinal enhancements, something far more powerful than Arak.
Holy, shit, this guy thinks both Murphy and Macoun are going to win the Stanley Cup — where 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
