TORONTO – For all but champions, emptying lockers is a ritual indignity pro athletes submit to with unmasked reluctance. They would love to be moving on, to still be playing, to be chasing a title, but in lieu of that, they’d prefer to be anywhere but here, in front of the cameras and reporters, detailing what went wrong.
It was thus for Auston Matthews and company Friday morning.
The Maple Leafs are a conglomeration of young men of varying fortunes and as such their elimination from the playoffs meant different things to them. That’s not to say that anyone took it lightly, just that the Game 7 loss to the Bruins had very specific and contrasting meanings to each who briefed the media. For the likes of veterans Tyler Bozak and James van Riemsdyk, disappointment was laced with a certain wistfulness, given that they’ll become unrestricted free agents with no obvious fit in Toronto. For Travis Dermott, a kid who hadn’t been on the radar when he stepped into the lineup in mid-season, it was still a pinch-me phase.
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After the season’s ultimate game, it came down, as it has for the Leafs these past two years, to Auston Matthews. He is the face of the franchise and yesterday that face registered … well, what?
Sportsnet’s Nick Kypreos reported that Mike Babcock has “lost” Matthews. This is not to say that Babcock misplaced his star player, but rather that Matthews might be disenchanted with the coach. And you could see cause if you break it down.
Though the team’s most gifted scorer, Matthews didn’t skate on the first power play. You might rationalize that by saying that the Leafs’ power play was in the league’s elite, but you probably wouldn’t get very far in that argument with Matthews or any of the league’s elite one per cent who must sit and wait to get a power play shift. (I’d offer up the names of other stars who have suffered in this way but none come to mind, at least in the past few decades anyway.)
Like any great talent, Matthews wants more. Like everyone else, he saw how the Bruins use Patrice Bergeron, giving him huge minutes, carrying the load. Matthews wants to be that guy. Two seasons in, Babcock has yet to deploy him that way. Yeah, Babcock had this idea of teaching him the game in his rookie season, teaching him how to play with men and all that stuff. It took, oh, 10 minutes or so in his first career game to see that Matthews didn’t need that sort of tutelage. Babcock has quite an egalitarian approach to game management, but Matthews could reasonably think that he should play more, not for his good but for the team’s.
Matthews wasn’t taking any bait from the media Friday. He denied that his relationship with Babcock either evolved over the season or shifted seismically in the playoff. “No … nothing changes,” he said in a tone so flat that you could speed-test rocket cars on it. Nothing beyond that, mind you, no Trump-ready loyalty vow, no pledges of allegiance.
The nearest thing to a second guess was Matthews’s admission that he’d like to play a bit more with Mitch Marner. Babcock has kept them in fairly separate orbits for reasons that he has never explained, presumably because he considers them beyond the ken of media and public. “[Marner] makes guys around him better,” Matthews said. “We have good chemistry off the ice and on the ice [when we’ve played together] it’s been fun.”
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Babcock went to great lengths to put out any fires behind the scenes and at the podium on Friday, although not before offering a critique of the media. “Anytime anybody does anything there’s a big story,” the coach said. “Sometimes, what is it, about 12 per cent of the time, it’s true.” Maybe I misread this, but it looked like Babcock was posting odds of 9-to-1 that there might be some hard feelings between player and coach. More good work from the Leafs’ analytics department.
“I think Auston and I have a good relationship,” he said. “I try to push Auston to be better every day. On the bench sometimes people snap on people. So what? It’s the game. I asked him flat out do we have any [problems]. He was sitting right there. He said, ‘We don’t seem to.’ You can do with the story what you want. I think Auston is a young man trying to be the best player in the world.”
Babcock suggested that Matthews went into the playoffs not in the greatest form and that seemed likely enough, even though his numbers in late-season games were pretty strong. Matthews missed a stretch in mid-winter with a back injury and a later stretch with a concussion. The coach said Matthews’s skating wasn’t where he would have wanted it. Maybe to all that.
But consider this: Babcock felt obliged to sit a young star down and asked him, “Are we good?” If you have to ask, you already know the answer, no matter what you hear. I’ll put a sawbuck down and take 9-to-1.
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