Jason Spezza received an unexpected call with two simple words from Sidney Crosby: 'I'm in.' After a grueling season that included an Olympic injury, a post-Olympics setback, and the Pittsburgh Penguins' first-round playoff exit, Team Canada made a courtesy call to Crosby, not really expecting a positive response from the author of the 2010 Golden Goal.
'I honestly didn't think it was going to happen,' said Team Canada general manager Brad Treliving, who is working with Spezza on the management team at the world men's hockey championship in Switzerland. 'I thought if anyone had a reason not to come it was Sid.'
Before Crosby agreed to join, Treliving and staff had already named superb youngster Macklin Celebrini as captain. This created an immediate, unanticipated issue. 'We named Mack captain before Sid agreed to participate,' said Treliving. 'When Sid came, he was adamant that Mack remain the captain. At the same time, Mack was adamant that Sid be the captain.'
'This goes to show you what Sid is all about. It's not about him. Just watching him, you can see the respect he commands from the other players here. Sid took an issue and quickly made it a non-issue. He's that kind of special guy and, until you see it in person, and watch him around people, you don't know how special he is.'
The remaining players on Team Canada, many of them NHL veterans such as long-time Leafs John Tavares and Morgan Rielly, were thrilled with Crosby's arrival. 'The players are all like little kids around him,' said Treliving. 'They've been so excited to see him and play on the same team as him.' The tournament began with Crosby and Celebrini on the same line, Celebrini at centre and Crosby on the wing, symbolizing the future and the past together on Team Canada.
This and That
There is something wrong with the Vegas Golden Knights firing Bruce Cassidy as coach and then denying Edmonton—and possibly other teams—permission to talk to him. That process is unfair. If a coach is fired, the former team shouldn't be able to control who he talks to or which team he works for. The NHL Coaches Association needs to get this changed. I don't believe for a second that Vegas will lose a second-round pick because coach John Tortorella didn't do his post-game interviews and the Vegas dressing room was closed to the media. I believe the NHL will announce around draft time that Vegas will get its pick back. This is mostly Gary Bettman tough-guy theatre.
Maple Leafs new GM John Chayka made the obvious move by firing coach Craig Berube. He then proceeded to say the firing 'was not a verdict on Craig's coaching.' But isn't every firing a verdict on somebody's coaching? The betting here is that Cassidy will still end up as coach of the Oilers. That's a team that needs the kind of structure Cassidy is well known for bringing. Kris Knoblauch was hired to coach the Oilers after they bottomed out mid-season three years ago. He took them, in his first season, to within a goal of the Stanley Cup. In his second year, they went back to the Stanley Cup final. You can't do much better than that. Over the past two years, general manager Stan Bowman got snookered on a free-agency signing deal by the St. Louis Blues, failed to pick up a goaltender of consequence, signed some bad contracts, and lessened his roster exponentially. So, the coach who took them from nowhere to somewhere got shown the door and the GM who took them from somewhere to nowhere remains in charge. The Leafs could do worse than have Knoblauch as their next coach.
Freddie Andersen just passed Jonathan Quick on the list of career playoff starts for a goaltender. Among the 24 goalies ahead of Andersen are Patrick Roy, Martin Brodeur, Dominik Hasek, Glenn Hall, Ken Dryden, Jacques Plante, Grant Fuhr, Curtis Joseph, and Billy Smith. In other words, the best goalies ever. An unusual place to find Freddie's name. Andersen has started 93 playoff games, winning 54 of them.
Hear and There
Brandon Pridham, whose front office work has been essential for the past 12 seasons in Toronto, especially through the COVID years, is leaving the Maple Leafs. The assistant GM and chief salary cap guru won't be easily replaced. That's Shane Doan, Pridham, and coach Berube as the first changes made by Chayka and Mats Sundin, although it isn't known if Chayka is pushing Pridham out or if Pridham is just looking for a change after 27 years in Toronto (15 working for the NHL, 12 with the Leafs). There will be more changes coming. Pridham, meanwhile, is off to Kelowna to watch his son, Jack Pridham, play in the Memorial Cup for the Kitchener Rangers. The Rangers are managed by Mike McKenzie, son of Bob McKenzie, an apple that clearly didn't fall far from the tree. Bob was the ultimate hockey insider for most of his Hall of Fame career.
I saw an online headline on Friday: 'Does Toronto owe Mitch Marner an apology?' And my first thought was: For what? Marner is playing the best hockey of his life right now with the Golden Knights. He scored an all-time highlight-reel goal the other night. That was something special. He's scored seven times in the playoffs and leads the NHL with 18 points. That's terrific. But it doesn't erase his playoff misfortunes with the Leafs. He played 46 games against Boston, Tampa Bay, and Florida in the post-season, scoring 11 goals in all. In the 13 games he played against Montreal and Ottawa in the post-season, he scored just once. Like the rest of his teammates in Toronto, he left fans, coaches, and management wanting more. He had one great series as a Leaf, scoring 11 points in six games against Tampa Bay in 2023. Strangely, this season was Marner's lowest scoring regular season in years. Now he's doing what Leafs fans had hoped for before he left via a free agency-pushed trade.
Should this drive Leafs fans batty? Fraser Minten playing for Treliving at the world championship. I'm still trying to understand how the Leafs believe they can contend next season. The Eastern Conference has terrific teams such as Florida, Carolina, Montreal, and Buffalo, and you can pencil all four in for playoff spots next year. Then there's Tampa Bay with all that up-front talent, Ottawa in the playoffs the past two seasons, the Islanders—with Matthew Schaefer, Ilya Sorokin, and coach Peter DeBoer—on the rise, the young Red Wings not far behind, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh coming off surprising playoff seasons, and teams such as Washington, New Jersey, and Columbus, all with a bevy of young talent. I left out Boston because I don't know what to make of the Bruins. Which leaves the Leafs where? Today, last in the Atlantic Division. By October, not knowing the coach or the roster, there is only one direction to go. More than anything, the Leafs need a Schaefer/Quinn Hughes/Cale Makar/Lane Hutson on defence, and those types of players are just not available.
Scene and Heard
I loved the idea of the FIFA World Cup coming to Canada and all of the excitement it was supposed to bring. That is until I started pricing out tickets. If you want the worst ticket for the Canada-Bosnia match at what used to be BMO Field next month, you can still get one for about $1,422. You can, however, get a ticket for Senegal-Iraq in Toronto next month for just more than $400. It's not any better in Mexico, where single-game tickets are being sold for the home opener at $1,881. The next coach of the Maple Leafs will be my 16th as a columnist. The best, in no particular order: Pat Burns, Pat Quinn, and Mike Babcock. The best record belongs to Sheldon Keefe, who is still waiting to hear from the Devils to see if he's back next season. The best interview who hated doing interviews: Quinn. The best coach who did lousy in Toronto: Paul Maurice.
Trey Yesavage has made four starts for the Blue Jays, and while he's being treated with kid gloves, all four have been impressive. This year's stats: 19.1 innings pitched, three earned runs given up, 21 strikeouts, eight walks. His career earned-run average through seven big league starts is 2.16. Phillies' Kyle Schwarber is loving life with Don Mattingly as his new manager. He has nine home runs in his past eight games, 20 overall to lead the majors. Mattingly is 13-4 since taking over as skipper. Boy, that Shane Bieber sure loves Toronto, and the Blue Jays narrative has taken a beating this season. Math that doesn't add up: There are 154 players in baseball with more home runs than Vladimir Guerrero Jr. There are three players being paid more than him. So, who figured on Logan Stankoven centring Taylor Hall and Jackson Blake (Jason's son) in Carolina being the most explosive line of the first two rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs? This is how you know the media is messed up in North America: When talents such as Arash Madani and John Matisz can lose their jobs and there aren't any networks, newspapers, or websites crashing into each other to hire them. I don't understand the thrill of signing the one-day contract in order to retire with a certain team. I understand it even less when it's a rather ordinary backup quarterback, Matthew Shiltz, doing it with the Tiger-Cats.
And Another Thing
Not sure I understand the comparisons between Marner as a Leaf and Phil Kessel as a Leaf that I've heard in recent days. Marner played on 100-point teams and underperformed in the playoffs. Kessel played on teams that didn't make the playoffs—except for one year, where he was Toronto's best player in a seven-game series against Boston. Kessel went on to win three Stanley Cups, two in Pittsburgh where he was a huge contributor, and one in Vegas, where he healthy scratched his way to a ring. The NBA names its MVP on Sunday night, and all indications are that the Canadian, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, will win the award for a second consecutive season. There may not be a third for SGA. The way Victor Wembanyama gets better every day, he could go on an MVP run after this year. I used to privately cheer for the Dallas Mavericks when Steve Nash played there. Now, I can privately cheer for them again because Masai Ujiri is running the team. Also quietly, I'm cheering for the Montreal Victoire to win the PWHL title, for one reason only: Shouldn't the legendary Marie-Philip Poulin have a pro championship before she runs out of time?
Does anybody in Toronto remember that before there were Blue Jays, the triple-A Toronto Maple Leafs were the International League farm team of the Boston Red Sox? The reach of the Toronto Tempo's first WNBA game came in as one million viewers on the many Bell television networks. What wasn't announced by anyone, though, was that the actual viewing audience was around the 283,000 mark. That's an exceptional audience for the first-year team. But to put that into context, that's little more than half of what a regular-season CFL game does on TSN and RDS. If David Popkins was getting all kinds of credit throughout baseball last summer for turning the Blue Jays offence around, what's being said about the team's hitting coach now? Jays were second in runs last season, they're 13th in the AL this season. Why do books about baseball seem better than books about other sports? My favourite baseball books: Ball Four by Jim Bouton; Summer Of '49 by David Halberstam; Five Seasons by Roger Angell; Why Time Begins on Opening Day by Thomas Boswell; and The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. A more modern-day runner-up: The Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst. Not enough was said about how much a very good Minnesota Wild team was missing centre Joel Eriksson Ek in its series against Colorado.
A childhood memory: I once saw wrestler Haystacks Calhoun eating at Switzer's on Spadina, and eating more than anyone I've ever seen eat. Andre The Giant would have been 80 this week. Happy birthday to Thurman Thomas (60), Sugar Ray Leonard (70), Tessa Virtue (37), Corey Perry (41), Floyd Smith (91), John Salley (72), Earl Hebner (77), Jean-Sebastien Giguere (49), Keon Coleman (23), and Gabriela Sabatini (56). And hey, whatever became of John Starks?
