Tyson Barrie is considering all of his potential trade destinations in the National Hockey League and saying how the Toronto Maple Leafs’ offence is “second to none”; how he’s been watching them closely over the past two winters and has been wowed by their up-front weaponry and their ascent as one of the league’s legitimate threats; how he was drawn in by their exciting style of hockey in the playoffs.
Then Barrie stops to check himself, shakes off the trade shock, and realizes he’s now one of them.
“I guess I should start saying we,” Barrie says. “I can’t wait to get there and try to win the Stanley Cup with these guys.
“I think it would be tough to find a better fit for me.”
Second only to the Mitchell Marner standoff, the greatest concern in Leafland as the off-season crackled with Canada Day fireworks was this: How could GM Kyle Dubas prevent his blue line from slipping from decent to disastrous with the impeding departures of the slick-passing Jake Gardiner and minute-munching Ron Hainsey and Nikita Zaitsev?
For years now, the Maple Leafs’ head coach and its pins-and-needles fan base have been at least united in one thing: their deafening call for a top-four defenceman who grips the knob of his stick with his left hand and the middle of the shaft with his right.
In absence of that commodity, the coach failed to hide his frustration as he stuffed square pegs into round holes, and the diehards pounded angry tweets whenever a Travis Hamonic or Brandon Montour or Colin Miller got dealt, wondering why their management team wouldn’t or couldn’t pony up.
Then, in the span of hours, the Maple Leafs secured not one but two right-shot defenders in their mid-20s with top-four experience and a reasonable bet that their best hockey can be played out in blue and white.
Yes, Dubas saves his finest work for national holidays.
“I’m just coming into my prime, and I think the last half of the year and in the playoffs that I was playing some really good hockey and I felt comfortable with where my game’s at right now, and I can’t wait to continue to improve,” says Barrie, 27.
“If I can get these guys in scoring positions and jump up and follow the play and try to create some offence, that’s my game.”
In Barrie and B.C. bud Morgan Rielly (yes, they know each other well), Toronto can now boast two of the top six highest-scoring defencemen of the past two seasons. Over that span, Rielly has amassed 124 points and Barrie 116, despite missing 18 games.
“He’s awesome,” says Avs captain Gabriel Landeskog, who had been trying to dismiss the Barrie buzz as hearsay but was stung by the trade. “We love Tyson. He was a big part of our success this year, and he’s a good friend of mine.”
Dubas must, of course, sort out new contracts for his righties — Cody Ceci, acquired from Ottawa, is restricted, while Barrie is on target to be unrestricted at this time next year — and he will leave it up to Mike Babcock to figure out which one skates alongside lefty Rielly and which one Jake Muzzin in training camp.
But Monday night’s bombshell reinforces a number of longstanding beliefs.
First, one must trade from strength in order to address a weakness. Colorado had been aggressively seeking support scoring for its Big Three, and a motivated Nazem Kadri will slide in easily as a second-line line centre. Kadri’s cap certainty is a blessing for budget-conscious Colorado and made him Dubas’s most valuable trade chip.
The Avalanche, who can’t offer UFAs the type of salary-bonus-laden contracts the cash-flush Leafs whip out with a ballpoint and a yawn, were rightly doubtful they’d keep Barrie beyond 2020. Plus, the Avs have similarly dangerous D-men coming in younger, cheaper versions: Samuel Girard and Bowen Byram…
“We’ve got Cale Makar — who knows how good he can be?” Landeskog beams.
The safe play would be to stick with cap-friendly Kadri, but Dubas no doubt channeled a portion of his inner Masai, realizing he and Auston Matthews set Toronto’s championship window at five years when they signed their mid-season extension (the same term Marner is reportedly gunning for).
They have Barrie now, and that matters.
Dubas says he owed it to his goal-a-palooza forwards and his top-10 goaltender, Frederik Andersen, to put “the best possible team on the ice and, particularly, defencemen that can move the puck effectively and efficiently to our forward group.
“We did lack on the right side of our group,” Dubas adds. “It just came off as a trade that probably made sense for both teams completely, and I think both teams met their objectives in it. So it was very easy to work with Joe Sakic.”
Dubas knows Barrie will snatch the headlines, but he wants fans to understand the importance of acquiring Alexander Kerfoot too. He notes that Kerfoot, 24, is four years younger than Kadri.
“It was a tough thing for Colorado to include him here,” Dubas says of the deal’s Danny Green. “His speed, competitiveness, ability to transport the puck, and ability to produce at a very good clip there through two seasons in Colorado is what excites us about him.”
A Harvard grad who killed penalties in college, Kerfoot flirted with the 20-goal plateau in his first two NHL seasons, and it’s reasonable to envision him hitting that if he sees second power-play time and is surrounded by offensive complements. He was also a beastly 56 per cent in the faceoff dot last season and versatile enough to play wing or take Kadri’s spot at 3C.
A trade call he describes as “stunning” interrupted Kerfoot’s big Canada Day family dinner up in Kelowna, B.C.
“I kind of had to take a couple minutes to digest that. Once you kind of get over that initial hurdle of being traded and you realize that you’re going to miss your friends and teammates back there, then you start thinking about where you’re going,” Kerfoot says.
“I don’t know if there is any better place to be traded to right now than Toronto.”
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