In one sense it doesn’t matter. Then again, it really does.
It doesn’t matter, you could argue, that the Florida Panthers and the Toronto Maple Leafs were in basically the same place six years ago, and today the Panthers are a first-place team while the Leafs haven’t really budged.
Spilt milk, right? What’s done is done, and there’s no point going over all that again.
But in this case, there is a point. There are reasons the Panthers could actually contend for the Stanley Cup this spring while the sad-sack Leafs are locked in a mutual death grip with the Edmonton Oilers in a fight to the finish to finish last.
More optimistically for Leaf fans, there are reasons to believe Toronto has started down the same path that got the Panthers to where they are today, icing a quality team that defeated the Leafs 4-3 on Monday night at the Air Canada Centre to secure the best record in franchise history.
So let’s go back to June, 2010.
The weak Panthers finished 14th in the Eastern Conference that season with 77 points, three points ahead of Brian Burke’s lousy Leafs. At that point, neither team was definitely ahead of the other in terms of talent or promise. The Leafs had Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf, plus viable youngsters like Tyler Bozak, Jiri Tlusty, Nikolay Kulemin, Luke Schenn and junior prospect Nazem Kadri.
The Panthers had Stephen Weiss, Nathan Horton and David Booth, plus drafted players like Dmitry Kulikov and goalie Jacob Markstrom.
It was at that point that the two teams sped off in different directions.
The Leafs didn’t have a first-rounder in the 2010 draft, having traded it to Boston in the deal to land Kessel, and didn’t land an impactful NHL player out of the seven players they did pick.
Florida, meanwhile, had just fired GM Randy Sexton and replaced him with Dale Tallon, who lost his job in Chicago after building the foundation of the team that would go on to win three Cups in six years.
Tallon said right from the beginning he would do exactly what he had done in the Windy City and build with draft picks, and he made three first-round selections in the ’10 draft, landing Erik Gudbranson, Nick Bjugstad and Quinton Howden. All three were in the Florida lineup on Monday night at the ACC.
Erik Gudbranson was the third pick by the Florida Panthers in the first round of the 2010 NHL Draft. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
Despite the fact the Panthers were losing money back then, struggled to draw fans and were controlled by a 14-member partnership group with no clear mandate, Tallon was permitted to pursue the process he believed in, and continued to do that after Vincent Viola bought the team in 2013.
So that’s the lesson, right? Stick with a proven plan, draft intelligently (and not just in the first round) and hang in there through the lean years.
Don’t panic, don’t get ahead of yourself and (listen up Edmonton) don’t rush your youngsters.
The Leafs, meanwhile, are about 15 months into a similar process. It was last spring when president Brendan Shanahan started reducing the organization to cinders, firing GM Dave Nonis, interim coach Peter Horachek and most of the team’s scouts. Just before that, he was able to convince ownership to take on Horton’s “dead money” contract from Columbus to get rid of David Clarkson, and at the draft Kessel was traded away for futures.
This season has supplied plenty of evidence that the Rogers/Bell ownership team is fully behind the hyper-aggressive “Shana-plan,” the kind of program the previous ownership group led by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan was never motivated to follow.
Phaneuf was dealt, young players were kept in the minors most of the season and the hockey office, under the leadership of Lou Lamoriello, has done essentially everything humanly possible to ensure the club lands at worst a top-five pick this June. Nobody lifted a finger to try and achieve short-term success.
These are promising signs.
Assuming Leaf ownership and the Shanahan/Lamoriello combo stay the course, it’s now up to Toronto scouting guru Mark Hunter and his staff to do as well as Scott Luce and the Panthers’ draft team have done in recent years.
Mitch Marner, taken fourth overall last June, will be the first major piece of evidence as to whether Hunter can work the necessary magic.
The curious historical reality, of course, is that the Leafs were actually in a better position back in 2010 to do what Florida did. Toronto had lots of money, a full house every night and all the tools necessary to gradually accumulate resources, but chose to emphasize muscle over skill and harvested no established NHL players from the 2010 and 2011 drafts.
The Panthers, in those two drafts, acquired Gudbranson, Bjugstad, Howden, Jonathan Huberdeau, Vincent Trocheck and Rocco Grimaldi, who scored the second and third Florida goals Monday night and was named first star.
Not hard to understand that’s when the Panthers started moving up and the Leafs stalled, is it?
Which brings us to today.
Mike Babcock has done an admirable job directing the talent at his disposal this season. The Leafs, emphasizing a skill-first organizational philosophy, now have a very good, very young farm club and three picks upcoming in the top 35 selections of the 2016 draft. The franchise is positioned well to move forward.
The danger, needless to say, is that Toronto will get ahead of itself in a way Florida never did. They might give up on the maddening but talented Kadri, for example.
They could move crucial picks to solidify their goaltending this summer.
Marner might be force-fed into the NHL even if he’s not ready. They could draft Auston Matthews, sign Steven Stamkos and decide the future is now and begin trading prospects and picks for immediate help. These kinds of things have happened before in these parts.
Babcock, for his part, firmly backs the long-term vision, although he finds it hard to look at the standings every day and see his team in last place.
“You’ve got to keep building, building, building,” he said. “There’s been lots of positive things happen. Now we have to keep doing positive things.
“We’re a long way from where we are to being a team that when the puck drops in September just knows it’s going to be in the playoffs.”
It wasn’t easy for Tallon to stick to the plan, not with attendance in Sunrise hovering around 11,000 until jumping past the 15,000 mark this season. But he did, and now he has this terrific young team.
The game-winning Florida goal on Monday night was symbolic, Aleksander Barkov’s 27th of the season assisted by Huberdeau and Aaron Ekblad. Three high first-rounders combining to ice the game and set a franchise record for points.
The Panthers were essentially tied with the Leafs back in the spring of 2010, then left Toronto in the dust. It will take discipline, patience and time for the Leafs to catch up.
