Quick Shifts: Maple Leafs’ Mark Giordano is 40 and lovin’ it

A quick mix of the things we gleaned from the week of hockey, serious and less so, and rolling four lines deep. Mark Shapiro's tablet advised yanking this blog after three.

1. Mark Giordano was with the boys on the bus when the serenade hit.

The NHL's newest oldest player turned 40 Tuesday — fittingly, a birthday following a maintenance day — and his Toronto Maple Leafs teammates feted Giordano with a round of "Happy Birthday" and a cake as they rumbled to Gravenhurst, Ont., for a team-bonding excursion.

A traditional celebration for an undrafted player who took a most untraditional route (KHL pitstop) to the big league and has now outlasted retired goaltender Craig Anderson to grasp the title: Oldest active player in the National Hockey League.

Milestones aren't piled by accident.

Once Giordano entered his early 30s, still effective and energetic, he set a personal goal of skating to the Big Four-Oh.

"It seems like a long way away, and then — bang — all of a sudden, it's here," Giordano smiles.

"That was a goal of mine. I think being the oldest guy in the league, you can look at it however you want to, but I better look at it in a positive way. I feel good. You know what? I feel it's an accomplishment, but more importantly, I just feel like I can still contribute and play well for our team."

Giordano is expected to patrol the Leafs' third pairing (to the left of Timothy Liljegren) when his 18th season opens Wednesday, and his longevity has become both a source of inspiration and admiration among his peers. (The Leafs pepper him with good-natured age chirps, too.)

"It's cool to see somebody older than me still in the league," Ryan Reaves quips. Reaves is 36 now but will be 40 when he cashes his final Maple Leafs paycheque. "It's great seeing a leader like him and a guy that's had a career like him still grinding it out at 40. It's cool to see, and it gives me hope for sure."

Drew Doughty — Giordano's fellow Norris winner and a longtime Pacific Division rival — shakes his head.

“I don’t know what that takes. I don’t know if I’ll make it that long. The body is super-banged-up already," the 33-year-old Kings defenceman says.

"For him to be doing that at [40], that shows how good of a pro he is and how well he takes care of himself, because he plays hard minutes. He doesn’t play like these offensive defencemen, you know? Don’t hit, don’t get hit. He’s a guy that plays physical and blocks shots. Really impressive.”

Giordano thrived in the 2022-23 regular season, posting a plus-27 rating, breaking the NHL's shot-block record and skating in 78 games — full value for his modest $800,000 cap hit. But Giordano's footspeed was a question mark come playoff time, and keeping up with the pace of a league speeding in the other direction age-wise will pose a challenge in his (final?) contract year.

While, as a fellow post-30-something, I naturally root for my fellow olds and loathe to read much into exhibition action, particularly when it comes to the performance of established veterans, Giordano has winked at his age on a few puck retrievals this week. And adapting to a more sporadic workload could affect a motor he prefers to keep running.

Aesthetically, however, Giordano is throwing it back to his youth. For his first five or six seasons, the former Calgary Flame used white tape on his stick, then he went black. Now, he's going back to white.

"I was saying to the guys, 'Maybe I'll get some more passes if they mistake me for another player,' " Giordano quips. "It's just changing things up."

What's old is new again.

Lordy, Lordy.

2. Pat Verbeek has drawn some hard lines through his first 20 months on the job.

The first-time GM has traded away valuable expiring assets (Hampus Lindholm), fired a coach (Dallas Eakins), taken a cornerstone forward to the arbitration steps before settling (Troy Terry), and pushed a pair of stalemates with key RFAs (Trevor Zegras, Jamie Drysdale) deep into training camp before inking bridge deals.

This despite having the cap space to accommodate longer contracts. Verbeek won't be pushed around, that's for sure. He'll use his leverage.

This approach flies in the face of the trend for GMs to lock up young talent as long as possible, which is what's been happening with other non-playoff teams like Buffalo and Ottawa.

For contrast's sake, I'm glad Verbeek has taken another approach here.

Just as there is risk that a talent of Zegras's calibre might make the Ducks pay big in three years, if his production increases in conjunction with the cap, there is also risk in making a player too comfortable too early. Or, in Drysdale's case, committing five-plus years to a player with a history of injuries.

3. Bill Guerin is like the anti–Kevin Cheveldayoff.

Whereas the Winnipeg GM can come off as wishy-washy on some decisions over important players — Does he want to re-sign them? Trade them? Hang on to them until it's too late? — his neighbour to the south is decisive.

Let's get Zach Parise and Ryan Suter out of the room, even if it costs us millions.

Let's re-sign a 36-year-old Mats Zuccarello for two years before we see how he looks in 2023-24.

Let's give 32-year-old Marcus Foligno his richest contract (four years, $16 million) on the heels of a seven-goal, 21-point showing.

Ryan Hartman drops from 34 goals to 15 goals? Prepare him a raise!

Absolutely these eyebrow-raising contracts might come back to bite Guerin; they'll be circled should the Wild dive into cap hell again down the road.

But you gotta appreciate the decisiveness. The man knows who he wants on his club.

"I know it's probably coming, like, 'He's this old, it's too many years, it's too much money, it's this and that.' I get that," Guerin told reporters.

"But you know what? I like our team with Marcus Foligno way better than without him. And if we didn't have him on our team, the first thing we'd be doing is trying to find a guy just like him."

4. Extremely premature trophy picks!

Hart: Connor McDavid

Art Ross: Connor McDavid

Rocket: Auston Matthews

Calder: Connor Bedard

Norris: Adam Fox

Vezina: Jake Oettinger

Jack Adams: Don Granato

President's: Carolina Hurricanes

Stanley Cup: Dallas Stars

5. The Maple Leafs operated the second-best power play in the league last season, and yet new assistant Guy Boucher's system has us believing that if it ain't broke, you can still fix it.

Toronto is taking a considerably more aggressive and active approach to 5-on-4. Instead of the five stars standing stagnant in formation, the pieces are moving constantly, passing with less hesitation, and shooting more frequently.

Even when the Leafs' power play has failed to cash in during preseason, it creates momentum and looks downright frightening.

We'll see if Boucher's results improve upon Spencer Carbery's 26 per cent from 2022-23, but the eye test says Leafs fans should feel encouraged.

6. In 2021, the NFL chopped its preseason from four games to three. Life went on.

I get it: Cash rules everything around me, and the prices for popcorn and soda are the same at exhibition games as they are for the ones that count.

Still, the NHL should consider reducing its preseason schedule knowing these players are already arriving to camp in great shape. The competition — often one NHL-like roster hosting a traveling AHL-like one — is nonexistent.

Hold more intrasquad scrimmages. More matinees.

Open a few practices. Charge a small fee. Drop the prices and encourage kids to come see the players.

Treat the pre-season as an exercise in long-term growth of the sport's fan base and less as a tax on the season ticket holder.

7. Sheldon Keefe made an interesting observation on how the vibe around training camp has changed since 2020.

"There's a different feel around preseason in general for experienced players, frankly, since COVID and shutdown," he said. "We've always felt like you need to have a certain length of time and certain number of pre-season games to feel ready, and then all of a sudden we started to play fewer preseason games or no preseason games, and [players realize]: I feel fine. And I think some of that is maybe bled into them wanting to just get past this."

We'll add that there is increased peer or team pressure to show up in town for "unofficial" captain's skates two or three weeks prior to camp, which is itself three weeks long.

A week into camp, Auston Matthews commented that it already felt like forever.

In Toronto at least, the staff has consciously made a point not to overwork its core. Most of the Leafs' elite players only appeared in just three of their eight exhibitions and weren’t asked to travel.

8. Before she was a Kansas City Chiefs fan, Taylor Swift was all about the Nashville Predators. Never forget:

9. Love seeing David Perron chime in on Connor Bedard's outside-in toe-drag deke:

Here is Perron's similar move from 2009, when he was just a sophomore:

10. Connor Bedard went viral when he became the Most Disappointed Man to Ever Score His First Goal in an NHL Uniform:

Bedard's coach, Luke Richardson, provided great insight to reporters postgame:

"He kind of a humble guy. He doesn't want to celebrate that [empty-netter]. He didn't even really celebrate coming in [to the room]. He's kind of bashful. He wants to score a nice goal, and I don't know if he even counts those. But I count them. There are no pictures in the goal column; it's just the number.

"He's hard on himself, so we're going to have to lighten him up and make sure he enjoys these times, because wins in the NHL are hard to come by. And once it starts for real, they're really hard to come by. We have to make sure we enjoy the night and have a little fun when you win a game.

"A couple of those hiccups when we missed an open net or fell down on a 2-on-0, we have to make some humour out of that and make it fun to come to the rink the next day, not tense and grinding the stick. There's enough of that. We don't need to put more of that on ourselves."

Great attitude from a coach keenly aware he's heading into a losing season.

11. A hill I will die on: The National Hockey League is getting watered down.

There aren't 32 Number 1 goalies, Number 1 centremen, and Number 1 defencemen to go around, and yet Gary Bettman is setting the table for further expansion. (Again: Money talks, and, say, Atlanta's expansion fee will be steeper than Seattle's. Those hundreds of millions get stuffed directly in the owners' pockets and do not get classified as hockey-related revenue.)

I worry that too many teams, too many games, too little trade action, and too long a season (a winter sport that crowns a champion in mid-June) will hurt the on-ice product.

More teams means more teams playing themselves into competitive irrelevance halfway through the season.

Is the NHL doing enough to create fans of the entire league?

12. As Minten mania hits its preseason peak — the Leafs prospect will play his sixth and final preseason game Saturday in Detroit — one more note on Fraser.

Something that has impressed Keefe about the 19-year-old is how vocal he's been on the bench, acting like an extension of the coaching staff. We're talking about a prospect here.

"I think I was always like that," Minten says of his in-game patter. "I just love hockey and want to win and want everybody else to do well, so I just speak. It helps with the camaraderie and playing as a group."