Brian Burke took over the Toronto Maple Leafs during the 2008-09 season and had to spend a year moving some bad contracts/players before he could start acquiring some of his own. Across the country, several years of poor management erupted into a stated rebuild when the Edmonton Oilers stopped fighting it, finished last, and drafted Taylor Hall first overall in 2010.
Ever since, the two clubs have been like that troublesome math question from Grade 9: “If two trains started at the same station, but Train 1 traveled at X miles per hour, while Train B traveled at…”
The moment Burke dealt the No. 2 pick in the 2010 draft — though he didn’t know he was trading such a high pick at the time of the deal — while Edmonton hung on to all of its own (mostly wasted) picks, the two rebuilds became the two great comparables among Canadian NHL teams. Naively, of course, we assumed the point would eventually come when one side could be hailed as the indisputable winner.
Well, we are here. It’s 2015, the race has ended, and there is no winner. Today, the Leafs and Oilers compete for whose fans leave more jerseys on the ice when the game is over, or for free agents like David Clarkson, a battle “won” by Toronto.
Remember those heady times when Kevin Lowe mused about how many NHL GMs would trade their roster for Edmonton’s? Or when Burke promised to build a Toronto contender “from the net out?”
Today, Edmonton’s vaunted roster is in the running for its fourth No. 1 pick in the past five years, while Toronto’s goaltending is scarcely more promising than its defensive corps. Which stinks.
Edmonton built from the wings in, but one still gets the feeling that the core of a good team could be here, if the right GM were to make the right moves around it. In Toronto, the core is almost unmovable, with so many players either overpaid, over-termed or overweight.
For instance: If I were an opposing GM looking at Jordan Eberle’s contract, I would say, “He’s only 24, with an AAV of $6 million for four more years. I can improve the player, surround him with better people, and that AAV will be OK when he’s in his prime at age 27.”
However Clarkson, who is 30, or Phaneuf, who is 29, are both older and more expensive. They are in their prime now and not good enough, and the only way to improve Phaneuf’s game is to give him second- or third-pairing minutes. But at an AAV of $7 million, that doesn’t work. Clarkson, meanwhile, is simply a walking buy-out. He is almost 31, and has 14 goals and 10 assists in 107 Leafs games.
So Edmonton’s bad contracts — Andrew Ference, Benoit Pouliot — are not as bad as Toronto’s. In this turtle derby, that counts as a win.
That the Oilers actually outbid Toronto for Clarkson’s services is as poetic as Edmonton stealing Toronto’s minor league coach, Dallas Eakins. A pipeline of Leafs farmhands found their way to Edmonton under Eakins, all of whom the Oilers have either parted with or would return to sender today.
Edmonton sat at the bottom of the league and drafted high, which seemed the thing to do. We know today, however, that a 30th place roster only invites a GM to thrust those young draft picks directly into the NHL, a program that has gone horribly wrong in Edmonton.
On Tuesday, GM Craig MacTavish, who took over this project prior to last season — “Don’t (lump) me in with a situation of power and influence in the management level in this organization. I’ve been on the job for 20 months.” — admitted the mistake, and promised to stop.
Of course, he had only sent Leon Draisaitl back to junior about three weeks prior to saying this: “The worst thing you can do is what we’ve done in the past, and that’s rush our young players along. We’re not going to do it,” he promised. “The NHL is not a place, in my mind, where you learn how to play NHL hockey.
“Our mandate has always been to build a championship caliber team,” MacTavish continued Tuesday. “I know we’re not on schedule, on the timeline that we’ve all wanted, but … our mandate is to build a sustainable, long-term successful franchise.”
Ah, the timeline. In Edmonton, they’re still in about Year 2 or 3 of a successful rebuild. The problem being, they started five or six years ago.
In Toronto, they’ve painted themselves into a corner where they may have to start completely over. That means a good year of getting rid of assets before beginning at rock bottom again.
Meanwhile, there are empty seats in both arenas, and Leafs jerseys rained down at the ACC on Monday night.
“I don’t know how that happens, what security or the ushers are doing,” Nazem Kadri said post-game.
Don’t worry, Nazem. They don’t have a clue what you guys are doing either.
