Who is the next Leaf captain: Lupul or Kadri?

It’s funny.  I could be really off base here, but I have this nagging feeling that the Leafs will have a new captain at some point fairly soon.  I don't mean tomorrow, or even next season necessarily.  But at some point in the foreseeable future.

Does that mean that Phaneuf will be traded?  That I don’t know.  But I just have this sense that as the team evolves, Carlyle may want to look around the dressing room and take a bigger role in determining who the real leader on this club is. (For the record, I of course recognize that Phaneuf is a solid NHL'er.  I'm still not sure he is a number-one defenseman on an elite team, but he's the best we have right now, for sure.   I'm talking, though, about an issue that goes beyond how "good" an NHL player he is...)

Let’s not kid ourselves, leadership is important.  Having the right guy in charge of the dressing and being the guy that others follow on the ice means something.  It just does.  I can’t prove it with statistics, but it does.

I go back to my youth, in the early '60s, and well remember legendary captains like Pierre Pilotte in Chicago, Jean Beliveau in Montreal.  Those were real old-time captains in the best sense.  Now, I well understand that there have been times in Leaf history that the captaincy was not a big deal.  I don’t think players particularly followed Rick Vaive, for example, in the early and mid 1980s.  Vaive was a great goal-scorer who, as the years went on, sacrificed his body for the teams he played for in front of the opposition net.  He was a player I liked.  But in his Toronto years he was young, not fully mature and again, not a real leader, I don’t believe.  He ended up losing the captaincy.

Other Leaf captains have ben important, however.  Going back to the late 1950s, George Armstrong was absolutely the ship’s rudder.  He kept the players from killing Punch Imlach, the demanding and prickly coach.  And in turn, he kept Imlach from being even worse on—and with—the players.  And he was, in hockey terms, a true warrior on the ice.  He was the definition of a guy who fought for loose pucks and was rugged along the boards.

Dave Keon (seen with Armstrong at right after the Leafs won the Cup in the spring of 1963) was not the most popular guy in his later years in the Leaf dressing room, but he sure  wore the “C” proudly and led on the ice by his relentless example.  I always remember the late, great broadcaster Foster Hewitt saying, during a game late in the awful 1972-’73 Maple Leaf season, “where would this team be without Dave Keon?”. He was right on the money and said what many Leaf fans were thinking.

Darryl Sittler was the most popular Leaf of the later ‘70s, and again, led by sheer will— along with immense kill.  He was the leader of the group in every sense, on and off the ice.

In the ‘90s, Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour wore the “C”, and both have gone down as two of the more inspirational Leafs in recent memory.

For years, Mats Sundin (honoured, of course, this past weekend at the ACC before the Leafs beat the Bruins) left many Leaf fans wanting more, but I will never question that he cared, or that he did indeed lead.  He led us to two 'final-four' appearances, and but for what I still consider an all-time fluke, we would have faced the Wings in the finals in 2002 with Sundin as our unquestioned leader.

Right now, Dion Phaneuf is our captain.  Some of you may recall that I asked the question months ago, before this season ever started, “Do the Leafs have an identity?”.

While the team has had some success this season at times, and we are definitely edgier and harder to play against most of the time, I’m still not sure we have that elusive identity that I’d like to see.  Maybe you feel differently.

Is Phaneuf the “problem”?  I wouldn't say that, though I’ve never been fully comfortable with him in that captain's role.  Maybe I just haven’t embraced him enough.  If he was wearing an “A”, sure.  That picture works OK for me.  But the “C”?  I simply don’t see it.

Of course none of us is in the dressing room.  I realize that.  I have no idea if this guy is the most inspirational captain and leader around.  But after a few years of watching him in this role, again I say it: I’m left wondering who really leads our team.

I thought it was absurd when the Avalanche named Landeskog as captain at the age of 19 or 20 or whatever it was.  Maybe it was a brilliant stroke.  But I think even a young player earmarked for  greatness and with impressive attributes is not ready to lead a team made up of men with more life experience than a 20 year-old could possibly have.

Now Bobby Clarke (left) proved me wrong when the Flyers named him captain in the early 1970s.  I can’t remember if he was 22 or 23 years old.  But he was really young at the time.  That set a whole new trend in motion- of considering young, emerging players for what had always been, in hockey, a role held by more senior statesmen in almost all cases. (I'm trying to remember, but I think Clarke replaced veteran defenseman Ed Van Impe as team captain, though Van Impe stayed with the team for the rest of his career.)

Here in Toronto,  I believe we will soon reach a point where Carlyle and/or Nonis will have to look at the captaincy.  Not because Phaneuf is a “bad” captain.  Maybe it's because I feel he was given the title without really earning it first- and getting it without earning it does not, in my mind, prove to me he is the real leader of the Leafs.  So I think some day, not too far into the future, the Leafs will look at someone else to take the reins. (By the way, I know a lot of you like Dion, and very much like the way he plays and see his value, so by all means take this opportunity to 'defend' him, if you feel I'm being unfair in some way.)

Who will that potential new captain be?  If they go with experience, it will be Lupul.  If they go with young, cheeky, cocky and edgy, it would be Kadri.

I’m saying we will have a new captain by 2014-’15, if not sooner.

If I’m right, who do you think it will be—and why?  And if you think I'm way off-base, I'll likely hear from you!


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If there are some recent posts you might be interested in checking out, here are some links:

• Gradings the Leafs Part I  (goalies and defence)

• Grading the Leafs Part II (the forwards)

• Reimer or Scrivens down the stretch:  who's your man?

• Jake Gardiner's return

• Are the Leafs where and what you expected?

• A word for Reimer doubters

• And for those new to VLM, one of my earliest posts here on  How I became a Leaf fan