So where are all these great prospects the Leafs “gave away” during the Quinn years?

Leaf fans are now in the midst of the annual gnashing of teeth over a) whether we need to make a big trade before the deadline (many think the Leafs can stand pat and wait for the young Marlies to step in next season and beyond…) and b) if so—who can we “afford” give up?

Yes, there is always a lot of futtzzing about in Leafland at this time of year, perhaps largely because we seem to believe that the organization has consistently just thrown assets (draft picks and great young players) away for a short-term fix.

I’m certainly not suggesting every move the Leafs made over the past dozen years years has turned out marvelously well, but I’m not convinced that most of those moves were “just plain dumb”, as people are sometimes wont to say about how the Leafs have gone up making moves over the years.

Heck, before too many stones are cast at a guy I’m going to talk about in a minute, let’s not forget we’ll be watching Tyler Seguin and Doug Hamilton play for the Bruins (with their Cup already firmly in hand, whether they ever win another one or not…) for likely the next decade. That was Burke, of course, if we're "counting".


My point? The Gardiner/Lupul and Phaneuf/Aulie deals aside, you generally have to give something to get something, eh?

And for for the record, right now, we’re all also watching Carlo Colaiacovo and Alex Steen (when healthy) perform very well for one of the best teams in the league these days, the St. Louis Blues.  (Fletcher gets "credit" for that one…)

Probably most of us, as Leaf fans, at one time or another over the past twenty or thirty years, rued the day that the team had traded away what we perceived as great prospects for some kind of short-term “fix”.  (Hey, it's always easier for we fans to fixate on an unknown draft pick or prospect with great potential, than it is for that "player" to actually become a legitimate top-end NHL player...)  And we all know, as Leaf people, that, whatever players have been brought in through those years (starting with say, Dan Maloney in 1978—and without him, we would never have upset the Islanders that spring…) it’s never been enough to get the Leafs over the top and actually win the much-coveted Stanley Cup.

But I’ve been mulling over for some time now, this idea that the Leafs continually kept “selling” off their future to try to “win now”.  (Yes, I will acknowledge that acquiring Tom Kurvers for the draft pick that turned out to be Hall-of Famer Scott Niedermayer didn't quite work out for us.  Kurvers was a good player, but well, we all know the rest of that story...though I should add, the Leafs probably would not have picked Niedermayer anyway.)  


That all said, my focus today is primarily on the Quinn years, specifically during his time as General Manager from the summer of 1999, I think it was, through the summer of 2003, when John Ferguson arrived.  I have already long declared my bias toward Quinn in this space, but I hope you will hear me out today.

I don’t have all the big trades in front of me, but I recall that there was immense criticism at the time, and through those years, that the organization was too often giving away its future for aging, sometimes not very helpful players.  It’s worth remembering, though, that the objective each of those Quinn years was in fact to not just be competitive or slip into the playoffs (which is the very low hanging fruit we seem to accept as good enough these days in Leafland…), but to have a legitimate shot at taking a run at the Cup.  That we didn't quite get there doesn’t mean the intent, in my view, was off-base.  Goodness knows, only what I still believe must have been a “act of God” prevented the Leafs from getting to the finals in the spring of 2002.  (Maybe it was that awful Mogilny pass in overtime in Game 6 against Carolina, but I prefer to think in terms of the former possibility…)

I will rely on those with far sharper short-term memory than myself to dispute my accuracy and assertions here.  My perspective is I have almost zero problem with the guys they brought in over those years, from Robert Reichel to Owen Nolan, etc.  (As I recall, Brian Leetch and Ron Francis were deadline deals in 2004, when Ferguson was in charge…but I'll come to those in a moment.)

Let’s look at some moves:

In March of 2003, Nolan was acquired for what we complained was a huge price, Alyn McCauley, Brad Boyes and what turned out to be defenseman Mark Stuart.  McCauley was a nice but replaceable player who had a relatively brief and OK career in San Jose.  People have cited “Boyes” as representing an example of the awful decision-making of the Quinn era. But the guy has played for what, five teams?  And he is not a factor in Buffalo—and they want to move him now, too.  Stuart, for his part, has been a useful NHL defenseman.  Fair enough.

So was that really such an awful trade, given that the team was trying to win a Stanley Cup?  Was it Quinn’s fault Nolan got hurt when we needed him to be healthy?  I’d say no, though I realize many will vehemently disagree.

OK, who else was there?

Well, acquiring Aki Berg, a former top-five overall pick himself, I think it was, for two players who turned out to be Adam Mair, a solid fourth-line guy (but there were lots of them around at the time) and a second-round choice that turned out to be Mike Cammalleri.  Terrible, right?  Well, who’s to say the Leafs, with that pick, would have taken Cammallari?  He’s had a nice, but uneven career, in my mind.  I’m guessing we would have been dissatisfied with him at various points in his time in Toronto had he come here in the first place.

For his part, Berg, while much maligned, was a guy who played a lot of minutes here and helped the Leafs win some playoff series.  Was that so bad?

In fact, we got a young player ourselves (Bryan MacCabe) in the fall of 2000 for Alexander Karpotev.  Karpotsev was at the end of his NHL career, and McCabe had already seen three teams give up on him.  But Quinn saw something in all-over-the-map youngster.  In Toronto, he became an end-of-season All Star and World/Cup Olympic level NHL’er.  Not bad.  And we had him in his prime.

Hey, I loved Danny Markov, an all-guts guy, and hated seeing him dealt.  But he returned Robert Reichel and Travis Green.  The Leafs were looking for depth and experience up the middle, and each player provided that.  And Markov never really blossomed the way a lot of us thought he might.

In 2003, Glen Wesley cost us, as a rental, a second round pick named Kyle Wharton.  Wharton did not play in the NHL.

Even the Ferguson moves at the deadline in ’04 to obtain Francis and Leetch were, in my view, defensible.  How terrible was it, really?  Francis cost a fourth-round pick, Jarred Boll.  The players who ended up being traded or later drafted in Leetch deal were Max Kondratiev (much ballyhooed at the time…), Jarko Immonen, Kris Chucko and Michael Sauer.  It sounded like a huge give-away at the time.  But was it, for a chance to go big that spring at playoff time?  If we had been able to get by a very good Flyers team....

My point today is not simply defending Quin,, though I do think he was grossly over-criticized for what I thought was a pretty darn good tenure those four years as GM.  No, the broader point is that while many of us have been raised in the hockey world to think draft choices should never ever be dealt, or prospects for that matter, giving them up doesn’t always come back to bite you in the back side.  In fact, quite often it doesn’t.

For all the moves I cited above (and as I mentioned, by all means correct any factual inaccuracies or include any big deals I have forgotten about…) I’m trying to think of which players I feel, in retrospect, were just a huge mistake to have ended up “losing” (keep in mind we did not give any of them away—in each case, we got something back, if only for a playoff run…)

Now, if you want to complain about losing little Steve Sullivan for nothing on waivers, well…I'll concede that one...

In any event, all of this leads me to say:  yes it’s nice that Burke has built up a mini-war chest of assets.  And yes you never want to give away top prospects, especially young defensemen who may develop slowly and then play solidly elsewhere for a decade or more.  But sometimes you can choose to expedite the building process—and it’s not always a bad idea to give up a bit of "the future".