In 1967, everything was beautiful. It was the year of love, it was the year of the Expo, and it was even the year of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the year of their last Stanley Cup, won at the time when The talking nose of Ducharme and where Ferland was making a career in Paris. Gainsbourg was 39 years old and he sang “Day after day, the dead leaves / Don’t stop dying”, verses which, in hindsight, seem to foreshadow the fate of the Leafs of the modern era, this hockey club whose the fans, in the absence of moments of glory, have been particularly spoiled in post-season post-mortem for 57 years.
Everyone knows the syndrome of the player who, after shining during the regular season, completely fades in the playoffs, when the scoring becomes tighter and the intensity goes up a notch. The problem in Toronto is that it happens, year after year, to an entire team at the same time.
The 2024 vintage was, in this sense, exemplary: pure maple leaf concentrate! Just two weeks ago, this edition of the Leafs had three players among the league’s top 22 scorers; Auston Matthews came within a hair’s breadth of becoming the first 70-goal scorer in 30 years, while William Nylander came close to 100-point season. As for Mitch Marner, he had 85 points in just 69 games. After the fifth matchup of their first-round series against the Bruins, none of these guys were among the top 60 scorers in the series. The Leafs’ best performers in this regard were Tyler Bertuzzi and Max Domi, guys who could politely be described as “utility players” — whose main mission is not to fill the net.
There is also the manner, obviously. The Maple Leafs’ first round looked like a pitiful (and merciless) demonstration of the famous Murphy’s Law, which states that everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
It starts with Nylander, who hadn’t missed a game due to injury since 2016 and who suddenly had to sit out the first three games, apparently suffering from an ailment that, for many days, seemed impossible to talk about. to obtain the slightest precision – the ritual formula “in the upper” or “in the lower” of the body having been replaced, in this case, by a euphemism of improved artistic vagueness: “unrevealed injury”.
The site The Hockey News then leaked the following information: Nylander, 27, was reportedly kept out of the game by a “severe migraine.” Well, I know that we have to take everything that affects the brain region seriously, and that the norm, in 2024, cannot be Bob Gainey playing with both shoulders unsleeved, but… collecting a salary of 11 .5 million per year and give us, the day before the most important sequence of matches of the year, the “not-tonight-honey-I-have-a-headache” feeling?
The picturesque Don Cherry, during his days at the CBC, was fond of this type of story proving, in his arrogant opinion, that Swedish players like Nylander and, in general, Europeans in the NHL were too fragile (wimpsmoumounes, in the words of the colorful character) to compete with our “boys” on a North American ice rink.
But Nylander had barely returned when his friend Matthews fell in turn, victim of an illness that hockey circles, as of Tuesday, were still describing as a “mysterious illness”, or even a “mysterious malaise”. We found ourselves in the middle of a fable: “they didn’t all die, but all were hit”, forced to fight with the periphrases of a coach to whom the league recognizes the right to shroud the injury of its star player in secrecy. more opaque while nothing prevents him from venting the matter himself in private to provide a significant competitive advantage to his betting friends. Finally.
Apparently, knowing what “not trivial” illness, with “persistent effects” (and which get worse when he jumps on the ice…), from which the best player of the Toronto Maple Leafs suffers, in this era of long-term COVID, was not of public interest.
And there was this story of optional training ordered by the coach the day after a clear 5-1 defeat. Most of the players did not show up at the arena. As the late Édouard Carpentier said: and that hurts!
But it’s not all about crashing, you can still do it beautifully. This spring, Toronto brought a theatrical intensity to this art of losing. The scene involves the team’s three best players, all sitting on the bench. Matthews addresses some sharp words to Marner (“ Just shoot the fucking puck ”, according to an expert) and the latter, in rage, throws his gloves on the ground. Nylander then allegedly told Marner to “stop crying like a baby.”
In front of reporters after the match, Nylander rewrote entire pages of the Great Book of Bubblegum Language: “There [a] still a lot of love between the players at the Leafs. […] We have high expectations of each other and we love each other. […] We have great potential, and I think it’s great. »
Well, precisely, the potential… In the branch of physics which applies to sports, the pressure felt is in direct relation with the potential. This unrealized potential which, spring after spring, like coitus interruptus, generates a ton of pressure even on the shoulders of Maple Leafs fans. “I’m scared,” posted one of them on social networks on the eve of the first match. In Toronto, performance anxiety even affects fans.
I finished this text as the Leafs were leaving Boston, still alive. What if, after looking like a bunch of cavers, they were tired of dying at the end?