Not fair to put the Leafs’ malaise on a struggling Phil Kessel…

Over the past decade or so, has there been a more over-analyzed trade by the Maple Leafs than the one that netted the supremely talented yet somewhat enigmatic Phil Kessel from the Boston Bruins when Kessel was barely out of his teens?

Kessel’s youthful ‘rep’ seemed to be that he didn’t mesh with his coach at the time, and despite his obvious offensive talents, the Bruins didn’t see him as a long-term fixture. (In fairness, the same could be said for a young Tyler Seguin, one of the guys Boston drafted as a result of the Kessel deal, when Seguin didn’t do things the “Bruins way”.) So the Bruins dealt Phil our way and the great debate was triggered—and continues to this day.

At various points in Kessel’s time here, I've seen Kessel a few different ways.  On the one hand he was the classic “he is what he is” player. That is, a gifted offensive guy, a shooter who would always be able to produce goals.  I also saw him, at times, as someone who was slowly “getting it”- an individual talent who was beginning to take his defensive responsibilities a bit more seriously. He was, I thought, maybe becoming a bit more of an all around player. Offensively, he showed over time here that he could do more than shoot, as he made the players around him better. He could create space and find the open man with pinpoint passes. Few players, at high speed, are more exciting to watch.

But coach after coach has not been able to get him to buy in to the kind of team approach (being accountable defensively, etc.) that seems necessary to have organizational success, though Kessel is hardly alone in that department on recent Leaf rosters.

Hey, Kessel was never going to be Wendel Clark, who could also score (when healthy) 30 plus goals a year but also fight, protect his teammates, run over people and win puck battles all over the ice.  Leaf fans love that kind of player. 

But they also loved Dave Keon back in the day, who was one of the finest Leafs of all time.  And Keon never delivered a hard body check in his life.  But he played a relentless two way game, killed penalties, closed off passing lanes and had a tireless work ethic. So that fact that he wasn’t a bruiser didn’t matter to those of us who held him in high esteem as a proud, diligent Leaf.

Kessel is just different.  He’s never been comfortable in the limelight, and it’s difficult to criticize someone who is so far out of their comfort zone.  He did not seek the attention he receives, yet his professional talents mean that, in this market, he is expected to have a kind of relationship with the ever-present Toronto media. I would argue that, despite his seeming reluctance, he has at least tried to do the minimum in that regard.

I’ve often said about Phil that, many nights, looks like the same player to me.  The only thing that is different is what we, as fans, call offensive production. And that has to do with whether the puck actually goes the net or not. What I mean is, some nights the puck misses the net, the goalie makes a save, a shot is tipped or blocked.  But when the puck is going in for he and his linemates, he seemed to be worth his eight or ten or whatever it is million dollars a season, because guys who can score and produce points like Kessel are pretty rare. And as fans, who doesn’t want to see offense- goals?

When the team was flying high a few times over the past several years, Kessel was a big part of that success.  In his early years here he struggled against his old team, the Bruins, but he broke through the barrier and rose to the occasion in the playoffs versus Boston in the spring of 2013.

We were happy to have him then.

It’s often been suggested that Kessel will never be a leader, or a guy that a team can rely on or build around.  That is likely a fair assessment. By that theory, he is more of a high skill support player, someone who can play on a top line and the power play, but who needs others to be “the guy” in terms of leadership and the intangibles that separate the truly great players from the rest.

Could Kessel thrive elsewhere?  Could he have thrived even more in Toronto, had management surrounded him with the equivalent of a modern day Gary Roberts, and a true first line center (and a better blue line corps as well)? The answer may be yes to both questions—though we will never know the answer to the latter.

In the end, the Leafs traded what turned out to be Seguin and Doug Hamilton for a gifted player who was never part of a team that won a playoff series in six years in Toronto. But that is not all on Kessel.

To be clear, the malaise here in this market has not always been present.  I’m sorry, but there’s no way I will accept that, say, during the Pat Quinn years, the Leafs were anything but a serious contender, a team that mostly played hard with a mix of skill, grit and heart. They certainly demonstrated those attributes during that short but wonderful two-year Fletcher/Burns/Gilmour/Potvin/'no-name' defense window in the early ‘90s. Players were proud to be Leafs, and we came achingly close in 1993, 1994, 1999 and 2002 to reaching the finals.

But yes, the issues that seem to be ever present in this hockey market always resurface for some reason.  It’s not that management didn’t care—Burke sure did, and so does Nonis. Every Maple Leaf General Manager and coach has since I can remember. 

But I will say this: when things go south in Leafland, the bottom of the well seems deeper here than in other hockey markets. That translates into more cynicism from the fan base, more caustic media scrutiny and a pervasive sense that the Leafs are “always lousy”—and that’s just not so.

Goodness, we’ve talked here about culture, leadership and “identify” for what seems like forever. When the team goes on a roll (it even happened earlier this season) it looks like the Leafs have enough speed, skill and netminding to be a playoff team.  But we never seem to get past the next hurdle—or find the consistency—which would put the Leafs alongside the best NHL teams.

I’ve long believed ownership is a huge issue here. That was obviously the case when Harold Ballard ran the show for two decades. When Steve Stavro was in charge at the ownership level, I sensed we at least had an owner who let the hockey people do what they had to do to build a good team.  But more recent ownership, represented publicly by Richard Peddie and more recently by Tim Leiweke, has seemingly not allowed their hockey people to run the show without interference.

Somehow, we haven’t been able to convince a high-end free agent to come here in, well, forever—unless we way overpay. Curtis Joseph was the last one, wasn’t he? Is that on ownership? Is it because of market pressure?  Heck, it’s not that the Leafs don’t pay enough. And this is the best place in the world to play hockey, despite the constant pressure. You just have to work hard as a player—and as a team, win a bit more than you lose.

In the times that the Leafs have ‘re-built’ over the past decade (and we should make no mistake, whatever term we want to use, they have been re-built several times) other organizations have built better, or at least more cohesive and successful rosters in much less time.

I’m not among those who feel that the Leafs have always traded away their future.  Sure, when we were good in the early 2000s, we made some deals to take a run at the Cup, but isn’t that what all good teams do—they trade prospects for a shot at a championship.  If you don’t do that, you’re just constantly talking about a “future” that never comes and building with kids that, when they get old enough, they often just end up somewhere else anyway. (Name a player or draft pick that we traded away in the early 2000s that has had such a great career elsewhere that we shouldn’t not have traded them for a shot to win a Cup?)

You have to have a solid foundation, including a mix of promising kids and solid veterans, and then add for the stretch run when you have a legitimate shot. 

But the biggest thing, to me, is not that we have traded away young players or picks, but that, for some reason, we have never found the roster balance needed to be really good when it matters.

This brings me back to Kessel.  Whether you believe, like Don Cherry, that Phil shouldn’t have to worry about defense and should just be allowed to go out and make plays, or feel Kessel should work harder, etc., Kessel is a guy who would be a very nice piece on a well-rounded team. He is the classic goal scorer. He’s never hit 40, but maybe would have in a different setting.

If the Leafs had players to complement him—a stand-out grinder, a slick playmaker, a hard-as-nails leader, etc., maybe we’d be thrilled with Kessel just doing what he does well. But relying on him to lead, or to be what he simply isn’t, hasn’t worked here.  He will likely never become a Modano or Yzerman, guys who took their game to another level by focusing on an all-around approach to helping their team win games. But those guys, if we check the rosters, also had a superb supporting cast. Kessel has never had that.

No, there’s something that happens to the Leafs when things go dsouth.  Whether it’s a matter of confidence, leadership, players just becoming fed up with the constant negativity, but when the team hits the wall, there’s no seeming ability to get up off the mat.

I don’t think it’s that players don’t care.  They do. You couldn't fault their effort in Montreal on Saturday night, a game they could well have won, not that it would have mattered much. But the game is as much mental as it is physical, and if an athlete is not feeling right, individually or collectively as a team, clearly we won’t see their best performance and the outcomes will suffer. That's where the Leafs are right now.

Kessel has not made the Leafs a winning team, but he has been just one of many cogs that, together, haven’t got the job done.  This is on ownership, it’s on management, on the various coaching staffs who have been here, but certainly on the players, too.

The Leafs not only need to “rebuild” (yet again, and the just-announced Franson trade is only the beginning) with youth, heart and skill, they need to find individuals who will thrive in this market, who will embrace being Leafs and appreciate just how much of a gift it is to be able to make millions of dollars playing in a city that so badly wants their team to do well.

When was the last time we had a true heart and should player, a guy who left everything out on the ice pretty much every night?

I’ve often said it here, and I believe it’s true: if a player plays their guts out here in Toronto, and gives everything they have, we will remember them forever.  Why do I remember Brian Spencer (see the old Dan Baliotti photo of Spencer in action in the early 1970s, above right) and Scott Garland with such fondness from their short times with the blue and white in the 1970s?  Because their pride in being Leafs shone through.  The same could be said for Brad “Motor City Smitty” Smith, Brad Marsh, Wendel Clark, Doug Gilmour, Gary Roberts, Dmitry Yushkevich, Danny Markov and many others. None of those guys won a Cup here, but they were true blue Maple Leafs.

That’s what most Leaf fans want.  Winning, yes.  A championship, for sure.  But mostly, they want a roster of players who bleed blue and white, who play hard every night, who understand why fans care so much, who also understand their social responsibility here and seem to appreciate being Leafs and what it means to represent the organization on and off the ice with distinction.

And if they can ever bring us that elusive Cup, that would be icing on the cake.