Ultimately, this will have to be about producing big league hockey players for the Toronto Maple Leafs, and we’re a long way off from finding out whether that will be the case.
After all, we’ve been down this well-hyped path before with a Leaf minor-league operation. Just four years ago, the AHL Marlies charged to the Calder Cup final. It was supposed to be both the dawning of a new era in the organization, and that team was supposed to harvest many talented players to the parent club.
Well, it sort of happened that way. The Leafs got Nazem Kadri and Jake Gardiner out of that very interesting Marlie team, as well as Joe Colborne, Korbinian Holzer and Ben Scrivens, although those three have made their marks more notably with other organizations. There were plenty of youngsters on that Dallas Eakins team that went nowhere – Jerry D’Amigo, Matt Frattin, Carter Ashton, Marcel Mueller, David Broll – and we won’t know whether this year’s Marlies will produce even as much as that team for some time.
But it sure is an interesting hockey club to watch.
Before a sellout audience of 7,822 fans on Thursday night at Ricoh Coliseum, spiffier and brighter and more modern than it was for the ’12 team, the Marlies eliminated the overmatched Bridgeport Sound Tigers, farm club of the New York Islanders. A 6-4 triumph in which the Marlies fought back from a 4-1 second period deficit and got five goals from their blue-line corps for a sweep over the Tigers and a date with New Jersey’s farm club, Albany, in the next round of the AHL playoffs.
Sheldon Keefe’s Marlie squad plays fast, and always prefers to have the puck. They outshot the Tigers 43-24, an accurate representation of the possession difference in the game. Bridgeport’s parent club, the Islanders, are still involved in the NHL playoffs and haven’t sent the same reinforcements to their minor-league affiliate as have the Leafs, and it showed in this series.
The crowd was littered with both Leaf and Marlie jerseys, the beer flowed freely and there was a wide variety of ages and ethnic groups represented in the crowd. For prices ranging from $10 to $49, the crowd exuberantly cheered for a flashy, high-octane squad that has been extraordinarily successful in the AHL this season.
The Marlies have attracted a reputation that they’re involved in something special this season, some grand and ambitious hockey experiment. Then again, hockey’s minor leagues are filled with experiments these days. NHL clubs in western Canada and the southwest U.S., for example, have bunched their AHL teams together in a California division, with five of the seven teams playing fewer games (68) than the rest of the league (76) in a bid to give players more rest and more time for training.
The Marlies are unique because they are very good, but also because they are young and small and blazingly fast. They share a structure with Mike Babcock’s Leafs, but with a flourish of the new age hockey philosophy that GM Kyle Dubas and Keefe brought to the OHL’s Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds several years ago.
The Leafs may have been the NHL’s worst team this season, but they have their secrets, and they guard them very closely. Even with these Marlies, there’s a veil of secrecy surrounding the organization. Ask for a few moments with Dubas, and you’re left with the impression you might have greater luck requesting an audience with Pope Francis.
"He’s here, but we’re not facilitating interviews," was the response.
Uh, ok. The team’s dressing room, meanwhile, isn’t open to the media after games, as if allowing reporters to view the inner sanctum after a game might be like be too revealing, as if we might see a giant laboratory out of a James Bond movie with dials and test tubes and electrodes, all designed to develop a new super-player for the Leafs. Perhaps there’s a big vat of secret sauce we can’t be permitted to see.
So exactly what the Leafs are thinking, they’re not saying, but they seem to believe they’re looking at the sport from new and different angles. The fundamental concept seems to be that size is not a priority. Skill trumps all. All that matters is how you dare to play the game, and finding ways to play the game that reach for conclusions based on logic and analytic data more than ones based on tradition or myth.
So the Marlies started the year with a small team, then got even a little smaller when defenceman Connor Carrick joined after a trade with the Washington Capitals in which Daniel Winnik went to D.C. and Carrick, Brooks Laich and a second rounder went to the Leafs.
Carrick, a mobile, 5-foot-10 blue-liner from Illinois who came up through the U.S. National Team Development program, played 16 games with the Leafs but returned to the Marlies for the AHL playoffs. As part of Thursday’s stirring comeback, he fired a hat trick, the first he could remember as a hockey player.
In Washington, he was buried underneath a long list of experienced, bigger blue-liners. With Toronto, he’s part of a shallower depth chart, but also an organization that might be a better fit for him because it doesn’t much care how tall he is.
"We do a lot of things that personally I try to do in my game. Every player makes each other better here because they have a lot of the same strengths," said the 22-year-old Carrick. "I think what is special about this organization is they want hockey players. They want guys who play with poise and catch pucks that maybe other guys wouldn’t and make a play up the middle and make it really clean.
"They just expect it. They want you to be a player. Where other teams might say, look, you’ve just got to get that puck out, or make a hard play, one of those vague hockey terms, here they’ll say you’ve got to catch that puck clean and snap that pass to the middle. And that guy who’s on his backhand receiving it? He’s gotta catch it and have his head up. They don’t hide from certain situations on the ice. They challenge guys to execute with high levels of success in areas of the ice other teams may avoid entirely."
Back in 2012, when Eakins coached the Marlies and Ron Wilson was coaching the Leafs, there wasn’t anywhere near the same kind of cogent organizational philosophy. Back then, a major part of the effort was to make the Marlies a commercial success in a city in which all levels of hockey other than the NHL had failed time and time again.
Today, the Marlies are solidly entrenched at Ricoh, and the money being spent on the AHL operation is to produce players, not help the team survive.
So there are kids, lots of them, and a style of play that is the opposite of the "heavy" style embraced by some NHL clubs. The Marlies play light. They’ll defend, but they’d much rather attack. You bring muscle, they’ll counter with quickness.
Could this all ultimately prove to be more about style than substance? Back in ’12, there were two blue-chip prospects in Kadri and Gardiner, and on this year’s Marlie team, there’s really one in William Nylander.
There are first rounders from other Leaf regimes, Stuart Percy and Frederik Gauthier, and draft picks that other teams were willing to surrender in trades, like Kasperi Kapanen, Zach Hyman, Tobias Lindberg and Brendan Leipsic.
Connor Brown, Viktor Loov, Josh Leivo and Rinat Valiev are Leaf picks, but not high ones. Ditto for goalies Garret Sparks and Antoine Bibeau. Nikita Soshnikov was a relatively unknown free agent from the KHL who’s a little like Leo Komarov with more skill.
So there’s a mixed bag of prospects with these Marlies, not quite the shimmering gathering of elite talent that’s been suggested in some corners. If the Leafs graduate four or five players to the NHL as regulars from this group, or about the same as the ’12 team, they’ll be doing well. Any more, they’ll be doing extremely well.
So we’ll see. Right now, these Marlies are about winning and excitement. Both commodities have been in short supply of late in this hockey market.