Brendan Shanahan’s three kids are young enough that he still communicates in movies that he’s seen with them.
On Wednesday he watched Auston Matthews play a game of hockey that only the very best NHL players are passably familiar with – and this in his first ever NHL game.
In describing how he felt witnessing the most exciting talent to wear a Leafs jersey in decades make his debut, the IMBD entry that came to mind was Inside Out, the 2015 animated feature in which the main characters are the emotions running rampant inside the head of an 11-year-old who struggles to keep them at bay, at least for the outside world.
Each time Matthews scored, the TV cameras would pan up to the suite at the Canadian Tire Centre in Ottawa occupied by the Leafs president and Leafs general manager Lou Lamoriello and every time Shanahan looked like the puck had bounced off a fourth-liner’s butt, rather than the result of a teenager’s, tenacity, smarts and talent.
He allowed himself a modest smile, but for the public, that was it. Inside, it was a little different.
“It was almost like the draft lottery grin,” said Shanahan, referring to another Matthews inspired moment when his outer countenance didn’t match what was going on inside. “But when there was a commercial my inner joy start[ed] dancing around … Are your kids young? Have you seen that movie Inside Out”
Kids and movies and feelings and memories are front and centre for Shanahan as the Maple Leafs kick off a transitional season for a franchise which – like it or not – is one of the icons of North American sport.
On Saturday night, with Matthews record-setting four-goal performance still top-of-mind in Leafs Nation, the club will play the first home game of their 100th anniversary season which – naturally – falls on the 50th anniversary of it’s Stanley Cup drought.
Shanahan has been working diligently to make sure that this edition of the Leafs – while likely not even a playoff team – at least represents the early stages of a program where the future looks bright. He’s hired coaches, managers and analytics people and sent lots of good players on their way in favour of cleaning up salary cap space and stockpiling draft assets.
“We’ve got a long way to go,” he says.
But all along he’s had a second job working with MLSE’s marketing and creative teams to properly celebrate and recognize the franchise’s rich past and exciting future, while not ignoring the extended doldrums in between. On that front the finish line is in sight. This week has featured the unveiling the of the latest Leafs great added to Legend’s Row – the repatriated Dave Keon, along with Turk Broda and Tim Horton.
Friday afternoon marked the introduction of the top-100 players in Leafs history (no, there was no last minute edit to add Mathews) while Saturday prior to the home opener against the Boston Bruins promises a video tribute worthy of a century of history.
Shanahan, the south Etobicoke kid who grew up watching the Leafs after dinner on Saturdays with his Irish immigrant parents and his three siblings, has had his fingers on every element.
“To me, whoever was holding down this position in the 100th year has to see it as A, an honour and B, a responsibility,” he said. “It’s a storied, proud, franchise that’s turning 100. That doesn’t happen to a lot of organizations, so we talked a lot and the whole view at MLSE was that there had to be a good blend of the past 100 but also the future; it can’t all be about the past.”
He’s loathe to hog the credit, tapping MLSE senior vice president of marketing and fan experience Shannon Hosford for doing the heavy lifting on a project that has been years in the planning.
“She’s a superstar,” he says.
But those nailing down the details of what will be a year of special events say that Shanahan has in many ways been the conscience of the project, willing to call NHL commissioner Gary Bettman to argue to get league approval for a larger logo or having players game test the centennial sweaters for playability.
“All along our goal has been to celebrate the past while signalling change going forward,” said Hosford. “And I can’t say enough about his engagement.”
How do you do that? How about having the 48th Highlanders start things off and have Deadmou5 – Toronto’s internationally acclaimed electronic dance music star — finish it?
For Shanahan it’s been a balance between looking over people’s shoulders and knowing when to back off.
“I’m fairly opinionated, would be the most polite way that our group would describe me when it comes to how the Leafs are viewed and how we pay respect to our former players,” he says. “But you have to have an appreciation for the guys in the room that know more than you do.
“We’ll be doing something to showcase one of the younger guys and I’ll say ‘I’ve never heard of this song and I have no idea what you’re talking about, but if you’re saying that everyone in this arena under 30 is going to love it, you know what? You have to know when to shut up and listen.’”
Shanahan doesn’t see a distinction between the steps the franchise is trying to take in their ground-up, draft-focused rebuild and the centennial celebrations. He’s sees them as one-in-the-same.
For him there is no better year for baby Leafs the likes of Matthews and fellow youngsters Mitch Marner and William Nylander to come to understand what the franchise had stood for in the past and hopes to again.
“I’ve always embraced that part of having a successful current team is to understand and embrace the importance of the people who laid the foundation down before you, even some of the ghosts,” he said. “To me it’s not something you hide from, it’s something you embrace and use to help motivate you.
“If you’re the kind of person that would ever be intimidated by past champions, then it doesn’t matter where you play or what sport you play, you’re not going to be a champion.”
Talent trumps tradition when the puck drops, and traditions are built on talent. With three Stanley Cups on his resume, no one has to tell Shanahan that. He won his Cups in Detroit in a lineup loaded with Hall of Famers, of which he was one.
But winning isn’t done with talent alone. Shanahan knows that too. In that sense he’s see the Leafs centennial as an opportunity.
“The competition in the league is so close that feeling connected to the heritage of an organization and the responsibility that goes along with that or if it’s the love for a city and it’s fans, I think it matters,” he says. “I think it’s great for our players to see that stuff and see how it affects our fans … to feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself.”
This is an area where Shanahan is in his element. Before he was a budding hockey Hall-of-Famer and before he was an NHL executive and before he took over the Leafs, he was the son of a fireman who played in the GTHL and who had no confusion about his hockey loyalties.
The theme of the Leafs centennial is Stand Witness, a tribute to those who have seen the franchise at its peak and a promise to a generation waiting to be rewarded for their faith.
Stand Witness? Shanahan has seen it all. He drops another movie reference, this time Ratatouille, another of his kid’s favourites.
“Remember the restaurant critic who killed every chef and then once he tastes the ratatouille he gets transported back to being a little boy and going home with a scraped knee to his mother and she makes him feel better with the home cooking?” he says.
“To me that’s Darryl Sittler or Lanny MacDonald or Davey Keon. They’re not just a player and it’s not about where they line up on the scale of all the best hockey players who played the game,” he says. “It’s dinner with my family. It’s sitting down on a Saturday night and watching something when the six of us would never watch the same show, other than a Leafs hockey game. That’s where I think the Toronto Maple Leafs, for a lot of Canadians and people in Toronto is more than a hockey team.”
This time I tell him a story. It’s about a group of 13-year-old hockey players coming out of a dressing room at a Toronto rink after practice on Wednesday night and one by one, finding out that kid just a few years older than them scored not one, not two, not three but four goals in his NHL debut. It’s about the wonder in their voices and smiles a lot bigger than the one Shanahan allowed himself to show on camera.
“It motivates you to create new ones. You want to create new moments for those new fans, the new kids. They’re going to remember where they were when Matthews [scored four],” he says. “[Those kids] will remember that feeling. They’ll remember that. We want to win championships here, but the journey to getting there can also be fun.”
Of course Shanahan didn’t need to hear the story. He knows what kids are like. But it’s a story Shanahan is happy to listen to. It adds to his conviction that Saturday’s celebration of 100 years of hockey – some great, some bad, some only forgettable – is just the start of something, that the script is still being written.
