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 on the Canadian squad has been pretty thin. A cynic watching the action that took place in Alberta in 2012 could snicker and point out that Canadian defenceman Dougie Hamilton should have been Leafs property — he was selected by the Boston Bruins with one of the two first-round picks that Toronto sent to Beantown in the Phil Kessel trade.
And what about Leafs prospects playing for other nations? Well, it’s not much better. During the 2012 World Juniors played in Calgary and Edmonton, the Leafs had but a single prospect, Swedish defenceman Petter Granberg, a solid if unspectacular player who eventually won gold with the rest of his teammates. In fact, Granberg was on the ice when countryman Mika Zibanejad scored the overtime winner against Russia. As a result, Granberg’s image was widely shown on highlights and in newspaper and website pictures in the aftermath of Sweden’s first gold medal at the event in some thirty years. Zibanejad, who belonged to the Ottawa Senators, is a much brighter prospect, but at least Granberg was able to bask in the glow of his much more celebrated teammate.
In the past three decades of World Junior tournaments, Colaiacovo and Swedish defenceman Kenny Jonsson are the only elite World Junior performers whose rights were owned by the Leafs during the competition who remained with the Leafs to start their NHL careers. Jonsson, like Colaiacovo, became a very solid NHL player, but he, too, was traded away, in the move that brought Wendel Clark back to Toronto in 1996.
Two other defencemen whom the Leafs owned the rights to — Finn Janne Gronvall and Swede Pierre Hedin — played well enough to earn World Junior all-star honours at two different tournaments in the 1990s. But neither ended up playing regularly in the NHL. Hedin had his moments, but as a smallish, slick defenceman, he came along at a time when the NHL game, and especially Pat Quinn, the Leafs coach at the time, demanded much bigger players. After a year of playing on the Leafs’ AHL affiliate in St. John’s, no doubt puzzled at the Newfoundlanders’ accents just as much as the Leafs’ indifference at playing him on the big club, Hedin hightailed it back to Sweden. Not exactly the big one that got away, but Hedin’s story could have been different had he come along a few years later.
All told, if you accept the premise that the World Juniors tend to identify the best teenage hockey players in the world, the Leafs have acted like a middle-aged schoolteacher with little or no interest in the best and brightest pupils before him; at very least, they’ve done an incredibly bad job identifying them.
And that’s just the World Juniors. The Leafs’ contribution to other elite world hockey competition has been just as modest. The lone significant NHL tournament where the Maple Leafs had a wide representation was at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City when Toronto hit the proverbial mother lode: Curtis Joseph (Canada), Tomas Kaberle (Czech Republic), Alex Ponikarovsky (Ukraine), Robert Reichel (Czech Republic), Mikael Renberg, Mats Sundin, and Mikael Tellqvist (all Sweden) represented their respective countries; Alex Mogilny would have played for Russia had he not been hurt just before the NHL schedule broke for the Olympics. Aside from that rather impressive contingent, Maple Leafs’ involvement in other significant tournaments has been rather modest.
Of course, both Leafs and Team Canada fans of a certain age will never forget Paul Henderson’s Summit Series winner in 1972 or Darryl Sittler’s goal four years later in the Canada Cup. Both men played for Toronto at the time of those dramatic tournament-clinching goals.
Much has changed in the international arena since the 1970s; the world game is now a much more mature and different beast and it has left Leafs players largely out in the cold. The result? When a major competition is going on, Toronto fans can sit back and watch
