Process is progress

Last Saturday, I did something I had avoided since April – I watched a Leaf game on TV.  The Jays game was over and it was raining outside, so this seemed like not a totally offensive option.  My reaction was much the same as it was the last time I sat and watched them:

“My God, this is bad.”

There were positives, I suppose.  They outshot a Red Wings team made up mostly of players I’d never heard of and several times I saw them attempt something that looked like a cycle,  It brought back memories of Mikael Renberg, who would cheerfully abandon a clear-cut breakaway to go cycle in the corner for a period or two.

But nobody could score, which made me miss Phil Kessel all the more and notice the absence of the kids we drafted, some of whom are supposedly good at this sort of thing.

Their absence, of course, is progress.

In years gone by, our prospects that found themselves playing in the AHL were there because they likely weren’t all that good. Now, they’re there because that’s part of the process.  They need seasoning.  We are having patience.  We are having process.

I am not inexperienced with the notion of process.  Many years ago, when ISO 9000 was a big deal, I was one of the people tasked with getting our company certified.  The ISO people, who were all very nice (they got paid whether we passed or not), told us repeatedly that certification meant simply that we had a process – not that said process was actually any good.  “Remember,” they told us repeatedly, “Firestone (then famous for having a complicated relationship with Ford Explorers) is ISO-certified!” (My response of “then why in hell are we doing this?” typically went unanswered.)

Anyway, we got our certification, becoming the first dot-com so honoured.  Three months later, when the company cratered, we did so comforted by the knowledge that should anyone be so stupid as to hand us more money, we could go bankrupt again in exactly the same manner. We had process.

Anyhow, Saturday was my first look at process as it applies to the Maple Leafs.  Again, I am not against this.  We’ve tried everything else andhaving a plan is actually kind of novel. This is waterfall development – old-school stuff.  (Burke was agile,  Don’t talk to me about agile.)

The only issue with waterfall is that it takes a good while before you see any results and have any real sense of whether what you are trying to develop is going to work.  In the interim, it’s a lot of design docs and waiting, and this is what brings me to Terry Martin.

FIrst of all, nothing I say here is a slight on Terry Martin.  I liked Terry Martin.  He was a pretty good skater, worked hard and was the sort of player who could score 25 goals (maybe 15-17 in today’s currency) for a lousy team.  He was one of my favourites from those early 80s teams that were constantly stockpiling (or, depending on your point of view, destroying) young players.

Terry had come to us from Buffalo just as the wheels were coming off the Sittler-era Leafs and hung around through the end of ’83-84, when his career was largely ended by what most people would have considered a stroke of tremendous luck.  He was picked up from the Ballard Leafs by the dynasty-era Oilers, which would have been absolutely fantastic had they not been completely awash in wingers. He barely played. A mid-season move to Minnesota didn’t help matters and he finished up in the minors.

Terry Martin really was, to me, the sort of player you get on a team just like this one.  He was likeable and you could cheer for him, but he was not going to be part of it when the team finally amounted to something.  He’s the Arcobello or the Panik of the 80s – just an interim part of the process.

If only process were a tiny bit easier to actually watch.  I think the old insult of “do you actually watch the games” will now become something of a badge of honour.  “Wow – you really watch the games???”

 

The record nobody is talking about

After 37 years, the most exclusive sports club is about to get its second-ever member, and a city awash in sports coverage is completely unaware of it.

One would think that in a city with four major dailies, three all-sports radio stations, approximately 1.6 billion sports specialty channels and even more blogs, someone might have noticed the momentous occasion that is upon us, but no.  It says something about the herd mentality of our major media that they get all giddy about, say, a Blue Jays AL East pennant and new hockey coaches and prospects getting sent hither and yon and manage to miss the big picture – and what a big picture it is.

Brad Boyes is about to accomplish something special.

When he plays his first NHL game as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs, he will tie the great Walt McKechnie for the mark first set in 1978: the first-round pick that took the longest to finally play his first game for the team.

Walt was the Leafs first-round pick all the way back in 1963.  This was the first draft the NHL held – two-time Leaf Garry Monahan went to Montreal as the first first-overall selection. The Leafs, drafting all the way down at number six, took Walt, then dealt his rights away.  Walt would rejoin the team in 1978, fifteen years after the fact.

This season, Brad Boyes, taken 24th overall by Toronto in 2000, will equal that mark.

Not that anyone in the media is talking about it.  I just don’t know where our priorities are.

Note – this event was a lot more exciting when I thought Walt was drafted in 1964 and this was thus a new record, but alas.  A tie keeps Walt on the podium, where he certainly belongs

Hockey wars and Wayne Thomas

Of all the Wayne Thomas cards, this one has the oddest expression.

It was an interesting time not to be blogging.

By not immersing myself in the process of writing things, I was able to watch ringside as one of the great battles of our era was waged.  This, obviously, was the epic “hockey analytics” controversy that pitted parents versus children, siblings versus siblings and troglodytes versus numbers higher than ten.  (I’m certain that this is indeed the most important thing to have happened in the past year.  Had there been any other conflicts, I’m sure someone would have mentioned it.)

For those who weren’t paying attention, the nerds won.  Just like in every other domain, people realized that if there is information available and tools to make sense of it, only a fool disregards something that could give him/her an edge. Knowledge is power, even in hockey.

At the same time, I do appreciate the position of the people who loathe the rise of the metrics. There is a certain romance associated with the ideals of sport – concepts like courage, perserverence, “grit,” “heart” – these are aspirational virtues and things to be admired.  We want to believe that they matter, or at least that they matter more than even-strength puck possession numbers do.  It hurts somewhat when they don’t.

(The concept is not unlike what happened to the Force in the most recent set of Star Wars movies.  The Force was this wonderfully elegant if somewhat amorphous concept that was ruined the second it became something quantifiable and measurable.  Seriously – midichlorians?  The definition Alec Guinness supplied blew that out of the water.)

For me, though, as a yarn-spinner at heart, I really want data. It’s not that I don’t value ephemeral qualities, but if I want to tell a good story, I need a good picture of what happened. I need all the information I can get.

This brings me to Wayne Thomas.

A different, moderately-epic battle that happened to coincide with the Great Stats War of 2014 centred around events in the Maple Leaf crease.  A goalie I rather liked (James Reimer) lost his starting job to a goalie I knew virtually nothing about (Jonathan Bernier.)  Reimer was the first Leaf goalie since Ed Belfour to show a consistent level of competency.  He backstopped the Leafs to a playoff appearance that they should have won, was a pleasant sort of fellow and was young enough to offer stability in net for years.  This was a good thing.

When they made the Bernier deal, which was not inexpensive to do, part of the fanbase was rather upset.  This has manifested itself into a really annoying tendency of Bernier supporters to jump all over Reimer when he gives up a goal (particuarly to the glove side or off a rebound) or Reimer supporters to jump all over Bernier when he gives up a goal (particuarly to the glove side or off a rebound).

My tendency is to do neither.  My tendency is to think of Wayne Thomas – and this hockey card in particular.  This card, very subtly, captures the entirety of another epic battle* – one that played out some 38 years ago.  (*about as epic as the rest, which is, of course, not really epic)

The card is quietly brilliant.  Thomas is skating left to right in the picture.  As it was in real life, he’s just come into the frame of view and is just as quickly about to skate out of it.  Clearly, he’s not playing tonight.  The towel around his neck identifies him as the backup, destined only for the bench.  He’s focused ahead, on things that we can’t see, but he can – and doesn’t seem all that happy about it.  What is his future?  Just ahead of him, at bottom right, the card tells us – “Now with Rangers.”  Why is he heading to the Rangers? Standing behind him we see a player wearing number 29, young Mike Palmateer.  Mike is setting up in the net.  It’s his, now.  Wayne is skating out of the picture, out of town.

Wayne Thomas had first come to Toronto in 1975.  The Leafs had been searching for a reliable starter since the middle of 1971-72, when it became obvious that Bernie Parent was jumping to the WHA and a decade’s worth of certainty in net was jumping with him.  The Leafs tried Ron Low, Doug Favell, Dunc Wilson, Gord McRae, Eddie Johnston.  None could really run with the job for any length of time.  Finally Thomas, who’d first come to prominence in Montreal during Ken Dryden ‘s year of articling, arrived in town.  He’d gone through a bizarre 1974-75 season during which he’d been the Habs’ third goalie and not played a single game.  Now he stepped in as Toronto’s starter and was great.  He played in that season’s all-star game, got the team in the playoffs and seemed set to start for years.  (Reimer-esque, I think.)

And then 1976-77 began.  If there is ominous music to be played, play it.

The Leafs were awful.  Thomas couldn’t win.  Backup Gord McRae couldn’t win.  Ten games in, with the Leafs wallowing near the bottom of the league, the call went out to Oklahoma City for a kid named Palmateer.  He famously told Leaf GM Jim Gregory, “Your goaltending problems are over,” then went out and spent the next ten starts proving himself right and rescuing the Leaf season.  From that moment on, he was a star in Leaf land, and Thomas was on his way to backup up John Davidson in New York.

The parallels to Reimer/Bernier seemed obvious to me, particularly last season when it looked like Reimer might not survive the season in Toronto, and if he did, then certainly not the summer. Now, as much as I liked Reimer, I could make a reasonable case for the Leafs wanting to upgrade in net. James Reimer had posted a .924 save percentage, which was great, but when you pulled it apart, his save percentage at every shot distance was below league average.  The Leafs’ penchant for giving up a bunch of extra long-range shots ended up subsidizing their goalies’ stats.  I didn’t like it, but I could see it.  (Note – these aren’t adavnced stats, but just part of the boatload of extra information and tools available for ordinary folk to analyze it.)

When I got to Thomas, however, I couldn’t make that case.  The only word I had that the Leafs even had a goaltending problem was Palmateer’s.  The Leafs were losing,  and badly, but how much of that was on Thomas?  This became a stumbling point for me in trying to make my parallel work: was what happened to Wayne Thomas in any way fair or justifiable?

If you look at the back of Wayne Thomas’ card, you see a jump in his goals-against average for 1976-77.  He goes from a 3.19 in 64 games to a 3.86 in 33.  That looks bad.  Then again, a year-to-year swing of half a goal or so isn’t that uncommon even for good goaltenders.  What else was in play?

 

He was good in 1975-76, too, but all the bullet points are about 1973-74.  Odd.

 

His won/lost record went from 28-24-12 in 1975-76 to just 10-13-6 in 1976-77.  Again, though, it’s not dramatic and can fit within year-to-year variation.  This isn’t indicative of a goalie who can’t win at all.  (I’ve seen lots of those.)

More problematic is that recent history tells us to rely less on GAA and won/lost records, both of which are largely team stats.  We try now to rely more on things like save percentage and, better yet, even-strength save percentage to assess goalie performance (I’m not dead convinced those are team independent either, but they’re at least somewhat better).  This data, unfortunately, is not readily available for games played in October 1976.  So the only things left to do are to hit two sources – the always wonderful Hockey Summary Project and Google’s newspaper archives.  From this, I hoped to build the story of Wayne Thomas.

When looking at old game summaries, there’s not a ton of information.  You can tell who scored, when they scored, how many shots were taken (if you’re lucky) and the penalties. Sometimes you get plus/minus data.  The modern niceties aren’t there.  There’s no ice time, no shot locations, no special-teams time.  It’s possible to fill in some gaps with the original newspaper write-ups, but the process of story-telling comes down to a lot of inference-making.

What is clear is that the Leaf start to 1976-77 was terrible.  They lost early and often and a lot of the losses were of the gut-punch variety.  They lost games to poor teams they should have beaten, blew leads and threw away points with reckless abandon.  It must have been infuriating to watch.

They started off with a 4-2 road loss to the Colorado Rockies (ecch) in the season opener and then somehow got past Boston 7-5 in the home opener.  The wheels came off in Game 3 vs the LA Kings, Oct 13, 1976.  The Leafs took a 4-0 lead 6:17 into the second period until a penalty to a kid defenseman named Randy Carlyle(!!!) began a string of five straight penalties to Toronto.  LA converted two of the power plays and scored a pair of even-strength goals to end the game in a 4-4 tie.  As it happens, Wayne Thomas wasn’t even  in goal for this one.  It was Gord McRae making one of only two appearances he’d make that season.  That tie, however, was the first in a series of really disappointing results that would see the Leafs go almost three weeks between wins and set off alarm bells aplenty.

The Bruins got their revenge in Game 4, beating Thomas and the Leafs 5-3 in Boston Garden.  Next up were the Flyers, with whom the Leafs had had great playoff battles (often literally) each of the previous two seasons.  The Leafs again blew a four-goal lead, salvaging a tie on a late goal by Jim McKenny.  They tied Pittsburgh at 4 for their last pre-Palmateer point, then proceeded to lose three straight games in poor fashion.  They lost 5-3 in Montreal, blowing a late lead by giving up two goals 29 seconds apart in the third (followed by an empty-netter). They lost 5-2 to the Islanders at home, giving up four straight goals after being up 2-1.  They lost 5-3 to Minnesota, again giving up a pair of third-period goals to lose what had been a tie game.  (This was McRae’s other start.)

Coach Red Kelly and GM Gregory had seen enough.  The call went out for Palmateer.

Palmateer won his first start on October 28 and would start every game until November 21, when he was pulled against Montreal.  He’d start every game but one through mid-December, lost a couple of weeks to an injury I can’t find documented anywhere, then was the undisputed number one for the rest of the season.

What do the numbers tell us?

Of those first awful ten games, Thomas started eight.  His stat line read 1-4-2, 4.71 GAA, .867 save percentage.  He faced 30 shots per night, with the Leafs actually outshooting their opponents 256-240.  McRae was 0-1-1, 4.50, .880.  Palmateer, fresh from the minors, would start the next ten games, going 7-2-1, 2.10, .935 despite the Leafs being outshot 322-266 (score effects?).

Cut and dried, isn’t it?  If Thomas is stopping 86.7% of shots and Palmateer is stopping 93.5%, there’s not much room for argument.  You go with the kid, and the Leafs did.  But for that injury mentioned above (leg, likely), Palmateer started every game he could through the New Year.  He cooled off a touch, posting “just” a .919 through Dec 29, but those numbers are decent even by today’s standards.  Thomas, when he played, really wasn’t bad, but couldn’t buy wins.  He posted a .921 save percentage when he played, but with the Leafs giving up 41 shots per game in his appearances, his GAA was 3.30 and he only went 3-3.  If anything, he was just unlucky.

Now, I have to admit that it was kind of annoying to go game by game through that season and I didn’t chase it all the way through 1977.  If one eyeballs the stats, though, Palmateer and Thomas gave up goals at a roughly similar rate for the rest of the year and were both basically .500 goalies.  Statistically, Thomas’ bad start doomed his season numbers while Palmateer’s brilliant start helped his.  They shared duties through 10 playoff games, with Palmateer starting six to Thomas’ four.

And then Wayne Thomas was lost on the waiver wire.  Gord McRae backed up Palmateer the following season.

What irks me is that when I try to answer my own question – whether Wayne Thomas was treated fairly as he lost his job as starter and was subsequently let go for nothing – is that I really don’t have an answer.  From what little I can tell, from about the end of November on, he and Palmateer were largely the same goaltender.

So why was he let go?

I don’t think there was anything to suggest that Gord McRae was going to be a better backup and Thomas had shown he could more than run with things when Palmateer got injured. Nobody was making that much money in 1977 and there was no cap in place, so I don’t see a salary dump as being in play.  I’m stuck thinking that Wayne Thomas was let go because he went 0-2-3 in a bad five-game stretch in October, and I can’t even prove he was at fault in any of those losses.  I can tell when the goals were scored but not how or why.  I can’t say that Thomas was prone to glove-hand goals or bad rebounds, or that he somehow had less heart or grit.  I have no information that would tell me why the Leafs lost his starts.

So the reality is that I did all this research in order to find no answer.  I think they did something dumb and/or unjustified, but can’t prove it.

This is why I’m in favour of all the stats anyone can give me.  They inform my narrative.  Unless I just want to make stuff up, and I don’t, I can’t tell a proper story without them.

Why on earth we spent a year arguing whether it was good to know stuff is utterly beyond me.

The Power of Memory – Dave Bidini’s “Keon and Me”

The Stanley Steamer – author of one of my favourite hockey memories

One of the coolest things I ever saw in a hockey game happened during the 1982 Stanley Cup Final.

The Canucks had only been a 75-point team that season. By today’s standards, they weren’t even a playoff team. In those days, though, only five of 21 teams wouldn’t see the post-season and the Canucks caught fire at the right moment, knocking off Calgary, LA and Chicago before meeting up with reality in the form of the mighty New York Islanders.  They held tough for a couple of games, but it soon became clear that the clock had struck midnight, Cinderella’s carriage was again a pumpkin and this story was to lack a happy ending.

The moment I remember came from one of the two Vancouver games.  The Canucks were being run ragged in their own zone, the Islanders toying with them like a hockey version of the Harlem Globetrotters.  Three Canucks ended up losing their sticks as they scrambled to keep up with the play. Finally, mercifully, the puck wound up on the right-wing boards in the feet of the Canucks’ Stan “the Stanley Steamer” Smyl, himself amongst the stick-challenged.

Any sane individual would have fallen on it and gotten the heck off the ice.

Steamer started a rush.

Kicking the puck from skate to skate, Smyl came out across his own blue line and approached centre.  To make things better, three Canucks jumped in with him – and between the four of them, there was the grand total of one stick.  The crowd, of course, saw this and went bananas.  It was absolutely wild.  The Islanders defenseman, maybe unsure of just what on earth he was seeing, backed off, giving up first the red line, then his own blue line.  Smyl kept advancing – kick, kick, kick, kick.

As he gained the Islanders’ zone, Smyl hoofed the puck over to centre, where the one player who actually had a stick rifled it at the net.

He didn’t score, of course.  I don’t know whether the shot even made it through.  It didn’t matter.  It was one of the best “in your face, I ain’t quittin'” moments I have ever seen.  It’s a go-to memory for any time I think of someone who just refused to give up, no matter how absurd the odds were stacked against him.  It made me a Stan Smyl fan for life.

A year or so ago, I was wandering around the internets and happened across a youtube video containing bits and pieces of Game Three or Four (again, can’t recall which and I can’t be bothered to look because it isn’t relevant at the moment) and started to watch.  Part-way through, a familiar sequence started taking shape.  The Isles were cruising, the Canucks scrambling.  Sticks started dropping.  My heart jumped. “This is it!” I thought.  After 30 years, I was finally going to see this moment again.  I watched, entranced, as the play unfolded exactly as I remembered it….

…right up to the moment the Islanders scored.  The Canucks then began recovering their equipment and skating dejectedly to the bench.

It became clear to me at that moment that what I had done for the past 30 years was to conflate two memories.  In one, the stickless Canucks were skating around like chickens sans heads.  In the other, a stickless Stan Smyl rushed the puck.  (I see this too vividly for it to be created out of whole cloth -at least I hope so).  I think they both happened, just not together.  The Smyl rush probably happened later and someone must have remarked, “Hey he has no stick again!” and my brain did the rest.  The great memory I had was of something that didn’t actually happen – at least not in the manner I thought.

For ages, I’ve been fascinated with the subject of memory, the stories that people tell and the way that they are told.  It influences the sorts of things I collect, the things I watch on TV.  It was the subject of the first half of my thesis and an influence on the second half.  It has coloured most everything I’ve written about over the past ten years or so on the net.  I’m continually looking at what we remember, how we remember it, the way we deal with it and how it influences our lives, yet I rarely devote a lot of time to the fragility of memory and the sheer number of times we get things wrong.

What happens when a memory simply isn’t true?

Dave Keon’s last card with the Leafs – 1974-75 OPC

It’s unusual that I fall in love with a book before it has even been printed, but this is what happened with Dave Bidini’s Keon and Me.

I’ve only been exposed to Dave’s writing for a year or so, being more familiar with his music.  His style is something I find directly appealing – sort of a personal whimsy wrapped around a real point and garnished with memories of personal and cultural relevance.  It’s basically a publishable version of what I’ve tried to do for years.  I now make a point of reading his articles in the Post whenever I see them.  When I heard he was coming out with a new book dealing with the exit of Dave Keon and the karmic damage this had done to the Leafs, I knew that a) it would be brilliant and b) I had to have it.

Eventually, the book became available for pre-order on amazon.  I read the little blurb describing the book.  It was tantalizing:

Hockey is the lens through which we see our lives—how we measure right and wrong, how we understand our hopes and fears. So it was for Dave Bidini in 1974, the last year Dave Keon played in Toronto. In a new grade in a new school, Bidini found himself the victim of a bully—a depredation he could understand only by thinking about what the Leafs dauntless captain went through game after game.

Throughout his twenty-two-year career, Keon was only in one hockey fight, in his last game as a Leaf on April 22, 1974. It was on this day that the eleven-year-old Bidini decided to fight back, an occasion that the writer looks back on with breathtaking courage and honesty. But while Bidini would remain a blue-blooded Leafs fan into adulthood, Keon became estranged from the franchise with which he’d won four Stanley Cups, two Lady Byngs, and the first ever Conn Smythe Trophy in 1967.

Told in two narratives—one from the point of view of the young Bidini growing up in Toronto in the early 70s and one from the perspective of the man looking for his absent hero—Keon and Me tells not only the story of a hockey icon who has haunted Toronto for decades, but of a life lived in parallel to Keon’s. It’s the story of cultural change, an account of the tribulations of the NHL’s most beloved (and most despised) franchise in the decades since Keon left under a cloud, and most of all, it is a story of growing up, with all the wisdom and sadness that imparts.

Part ode to a legendary hockey player, part memoir, Keon and Me captures what we all cherish in the game we love and the importance of the innocence we cling to long after the cheers have faded.

This is my sort of thing, of course, for reasons I’ll get into.

There was just one issue – one single thing that went clank as I read it.  The historian in me hit this and balked:

Keon was only in one hockey fight, in his last game as a Leaf on April 22, 1974.

Keon was in just one fight.  I knew this already.  It happened against Greg Sheppard of the Bruins – himself not much of a fighter.  I once saw Keon talking about it (on Don Cherry’s old Grapevine show, maybe?), explaining how once the fight was over, he didn’t really know what to do and needed to be told to get his things together and go to the penalty box.  It was a good story.  The only issue with it is that it didn’t happen in his last game as a Leaf – it was just the last regular-season game of 1973-74.  (Also, it was April 8, not April 22.)   Dave Keon’s real last game – a 1975 playoff game against the Flyers – wouldn’t come for another full season.

Uh oh.

I rationalized this.  The odds that Bidini wrote his own blurb were minimal and who knew how closely that person had read the story?  At the same time, it was upsetting.  What if this event was central to the story being told and it wasn’t actually correct?  What would it mean?

I didn’t pre-order the book.  I waited for it to come out and then I found one at the store.  I picked one up and read the dust jacket.  Clank.  It was there again.  It was the same text that amazon had, bad date and all.  I put the book back.  This was upsetting.

It took me a couple of days to order my copy.  Once it got to me, I no longer cared about the error.  I would read it and find out for myself.

A new book is a special treat.  It’s all promise and opportunity.  I savoured this one a little bit, enjoying the half-hidden image of the player who could only be Keon, but was cloaked in mystery.  I ran my fingers along the raised letters on the cover.  I then squirreled it away like a forbidden candy, reading it in three bursts, two as I put the kids to sleep and the third in a stolen moment by the lake.

The book is brilliant, of course,  I expected no less.  It helps that I can see a lot of myself in the young Bidini.  I was also a quieter kid that had some trouble with bullies.  I also had the experiences of social redemption through hockey.  Like Dave, I was even the one tabbed to play goal in crucial neighbourhood games.  I recognized a lot of this.  I know the feeling of facing the bully head-to-head on the sporting field and coming away with the win.  I lived the moment of fighting back.  I’ve shared the experience of seeing the tormentor years later and realizing that there’s nothing there any longer, no anger to hold on to.  These are feelings common to many of us, I suspect.

The thing that I didn’t know and the what I particularly gained from this book was the experience of Keon.  I never got to know Keon the way Bidini did and this was a revelation to me.

Sadly for me, this is how I remember Dave Keon

When I was first really getting into hockey, Dave Keon was an aging member of the Hartford Whalers.  On the first card of his that I had, he wore the expression of a man who had just had a warm turd waved under his nose.  My friends and I found this a source of great amusement.  I showed this card to my mother, who said quietly and maybe a little wistfully, “He was my favourite.”  She was a little surprised he was still playing.

For me, Keon was a player I’d learned to appreciate intellectually.  I knew that those who had watched him ranked him among the best they’d ever seen in blue and white.  It mattered a lot to me that he came back for the 40th aniversary celebrations in 2007, as it was clearly an important moment.  Yet somehow, I never really felt the emotional connection.  I never knew why I needed to love Dave Keon..  This is what this book gave to me and this is why I was so glad to read it.  I needed this book, because lately I hadn’t been feeling the Leaf magic either.  This helped bring it back to me.

Dave Keon’s 1966-67 card – the year he’d win the Conn Smythe as Playoff MVP

It’s the knack of a great storyteller to be able to make the reader feel part of the story.  Dave Bidini’s ability here was to make the child that he was familiar to the child that I was, to make me understand his growth in the context of my own, and thus to make me appreciate the impact of the things he saw and felt that I had not.  Being able to relate to him let me relate to what he felt in a way that no straight hockey book (of which I’ve read innumerable) could do.

It’s interesting that even as the story approached its end, I had no idea whether he would actually find and meet Keon, and I wasn’t even certain that it mattered.  This seemed very much a journey that would be completed just through the effort of starting it.  All the growth and the conflict resolution happens along the way, to the point where the ultimate goal almost becomes unnecessary.  It’s kind of a variation of the confrontation with the bully, where you finally realize that he no longer has any hold on you and you gain the freedom to simply walk away.  The finality of a confrontation, even though it’s a narrative staple, wasn’t really required.  The search for Keon is simply a search for self expressed through this dream of a hockey player and I’m not dead certain you fully need the one to find the other.

Still, the one thing that nagged me was the issue of the fight.  Would it turn out to a be key moment in the story, and if so, what would it mean that it didn’t happen when the dust jacket said it did?  This was the one cloud that hung out there over the horizon for me.

As it turned out, it didn’t really matter.  Keon’s fight was always going to be used as a metaphor and it was handled just fine.  The sequence of events was less important than the fact that they happened and how they informed his thoughts and actions.  I found myself OK with this.

All the same, on the last page, once the story was done and told, Bidini made a little wink and a nod that, if not for me personally, was certainly aimed at people like me.  He said this:

Also, timelines have been slightly shuffled and names changed wherever required.  Most of the prose remains as true to non-fiction as possible, if toeing the waters of what someexperts have taken to calling “creative non-fiction.”

It wasn’t bad memory, it was artistic license.  It’s not the sequence that matters, it’s the significance, it’s what the memories mean and how they help tell the story that makes them valuable.  The person who wrote the dust jacket might not have picked up on it, but Dave Bidini certainly knew, and for this I was glad.

Good thing, because the date of the Salming/Bridgman fight was wrong, too.  Just saying.

So who is David Clarkson, anyway?

When the Leafs signed David Clarkson in the early days of free agency, there were myriad responses.  The one I found most eyebrow-raising was the Toronto Sun’s, who ran a large front-page image of a heavily-Photoshopped Clarkson sporting a late-80s mullet and Fu-Manchu stache.  The title?  “WENDEL CLARKSON.”

I do get where they were trying to go.  Clarkson, like Clark, is a tough winger who fights and scores and it has been a good while since the Leafs had a presence like this.  From what I’ve seen and heard of Clarkson, who grew up as a Leaf fan, I don’t think he’d make that comparison.  Wendel Clark, of course, is the Highlander – there can only be one.  (Clarkson will wear number 71 in tribute to Clark’s 17.  This also ends up being a nice little nod to Mike Foligno, who couldn’t wear 17 because Clark was still in it.)

So who is he, then?  I saw some people make comparisons to Gary Roberts, but I don’t think that’s fully accurate, either (though Roberts is the most recent player of this category that I can think of – Tucker was too small).  To me, there is really only one comparable and it’s the one that struck me immediately.

David Clarkson is Dan Maloney.

People get upset when I say things like this.  When I first mentioned it on Twitter, for example, the immediate response was “OUCH!” I attribute this to the tendency people have to assume that the very bad results obtained by 1980s teams were caused by very bad players (it was much more the case that they were caused by very young players). Those teams didn’t play well together but this didn’t mean the component parts were poor.  Dan Maloney was not a bad hockey player.  To the contrary, I’d say that he delivered precisely what he was expected to deliver.

Maloney was to bring toughness, character, to be a good personality in the room, to have a willingness to intimidate opponents and stand up for his teammates all while delivering enough offense to reasonably play in the top six.  He did all this.  More than once, I’ve seen him credited as a major factor in the Leafs’ upset of the Islanders in the 1978 playoffs.  The Islanders’ rookie sensation Mike Bossy did very little in that series, and Maloney apparently deserved a lot of the credit for shutting him down.  (I say “apparently” because I was out west and didn’t see it live.)

The problem with Dan Maloney wasn’t anything to do with Dan Maloney the player – it was just the price we paid to get him.

The Leafs of 1977-78 weren’t that “tough” in the conventional sense.  Certainly, Tiger Williams was on that team and he was worth two or three conventional tough guys all by himself, but behind him were either scrappy-tough players in the Pat Boutette mold or crush-you-into-little-pieces bodycheckers like Brian Glennie who didn’t really fight.  There were minor-league tough guys like Kurt Walker, but not a big, tough, intimidating scoring winger who you could play with any regularity.  Coach Roger Neilson apparently coveted this and Harold Ballard always loved that sort of thing.  Thus it came to light that the Leafs were in the market for a “Dan Maloney-type player.”  This quickly evolved into the Leafs needing none other than Dan Maloney himself.

All of this would have been fine except for the inconvenient fact that Maloney was a Detroit Red Wing.

Leaf GM Jim Gregory was thus put into the spot of having to deal for Maloney under the spotlight of everyone knowing his owner expected him to make the deal happen. The Wings were more than happy to extract a huge price.  Maloney, whose stat line for Detroit would read a decent (but not spectacular) 66-16-29-45-151, ultimately commanded scoring winger Errol Thompson, a first and second-round pick in 1978 and another first in 1980.  Detroit sent along a second-rounder to keep Maloney company.  (It wasn’t Maloney’s first big deal – he was also part of the deal worked out between Detroit and LA after the Kings signed Marcel Dionne.)

This was a huge price.  Fans were at least spared the whole Kessel/Seguin/Hamilton nonsense as Detroit ended up with little production from their picks (the Leafs arguably did better with the second-rounder they received than Detroit did with anything), but it was four sizable pieces for a guy not expected to play with Sittler and McDonald.  Further, it cost the Leafs team speed in an era that was starting to value skating ability.  At 27, Maloney wasn’t exactly old, but he was at an age where tough guys seem to wise up a little bit and pick their spots a bit more.  He wasn’t the wild man he’d have been at 22-23.

In a nutshell, the things that one would question about the Maloney trade are precisely the sort of things that concern me about the Clarkson signing.  I have no issue with Clarkson himself.  I can see him being a useful piece and I expect to like him as a player.  It’s just that the Leafs dumped some pretty solid skating forwards in Frattin and Grabovski and replaced that skating with Clarkson’s toughness.  This comes despite team speed being one of the Leafs’ best weapons against Boston.  The term and dollar value are kind of long for a guy who will probably scale back on the “tough” factor as he heads into his 30s and it’s not clear just what we can expect offensively.

Of course, if he’s a factor in a nice little playoff run next spring, all that will be forgotten in a hurry.

(Note – the failure of this trade to make the Leafs into a contender was one of the factors leading to the exit of GM Jim Gregory.  Given that this was not actually his idea, this is rather unfair.  But before the anti-Nonis crowd begins to hope for the same fate for the current GM, remember that the end of Jim Gregory ushered in the return of Punch Imlach, and to put it charitably, that was a bad, bad, bad, bad thing.  Be careful what you wish for.)

Dan had two big seasons as the top LW for the Kings and Wings, both of whom had very little depth up front. Coming to the Leafs, he didn’t see top line action and his numbers reflected this.

An appropriate first post

This card is a slant cut.

I think that one of the worst things you can do to yourself as a writer is demand that you start a new site off with some sort of bang.  It leads to so much second-guessing that it’s entirely possible to never write at all.  It has held me up here for ages.

So in that light, I declare this post to be content-free.

I do want to choose an image to go with this post, though, because this lets me test the various templates.  Choosing an image, of course, offers the exact same trouble as choosing a subject.  Should it be Wendel?  Stumpy? Teeder?   Who is best to represent what I want to do going forward?

What I did at the end was to close my eyes, mouse about my folder with all the images, click on one and live with it.  I got this card.  And it’s appropriate.  I wrote the Leaf of the Day for a long, long time, but the very first card I ever used was this one.  The text was something wonderful and expansive like, “Look! It’s Paul Henderson!”

So even though this is a terrible scan (I never, ever show the holder) and it’s slightly undersized compared to what I would normally want, it makes sense to use it again.

Now – to say something wonderful, expansive and yet pithy and memorable….

Look!  It’s Paul Henderson!

Describing someone as the league leader in goalposts is something one never sees on modern cards.