Toronto Maple Leafs new head coach Craig Berube speaks to the media during a press conference at the start of the team's training camp in Toronto on Sept. 18.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
The winds of change may not have been strong enough to dislodge the Core Four over the summer, but gusts were certainly reverberating at the boardroom level as the Toronto Maple Leafs opened training camp on Wednesday morning.
Beyond the retooled blueline, a new captain and a new head coach, the ownership shakeup, with Rogers Communications set to become the majority owner of the Leafs’ parent company, Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment, was as much a topic of conversation as the expiring contracts of Mitch Marner and John Tavares.
However, team president Brendan Shanahan, captain Auston Matthews, and Tavares, his immediate predecessor wearing the C, all expressed confidence that the resources and support for their team would remain exactly the same.
“I don’t really think it changes anything,” Shanahan said. “As I said, what’s most important to me, and it has been from the day I’ve been hired to today is, how do I contribute to making the Maple Leafs better? How can we get to our ultimate goal of winning the Stanley Cup?
“And I’m not afraid to talk about the Stanley Cup. I think you have to have that goal. I know that there’s a day-to-day job and steps to take to get there, but as far as the ownership announcement today, their focus and their goal are shared by me, and they’re very supportive.”
Improbable though it may seem when talking about a team with one playoff series victory in 20 years, one of the keys to that goal is a new voice behind the bench. While many of the players discussed their off-season training and hopes and dreams for the new season – and why this campaign will end differently than the previous 57 – Craig Berube is refreshingly unencumbered by the baggage of this team’s previous playoff failures.
In addition, while none of the Leafs big hitters – Tavares, Matthews, Marner, or William Nylander – have made it as far as a conference final, Berube led the St. Louis Blues to hockey’s summit five years ago, beating the Leafs’ perennial postseason nemesis, the Boston Bruins, in the Stanley Cup final.
Berube put an early emphasis on using training camp to establish this team’s identity and his system, one that is predicated on having big defencemen and a fast, aggressive attack.
“We definitely want to be a north-south team, but there’s some high-end skill here, more than we had in St Louis,” he said. “Not that we didn’t have skilled players in St Louis, but I’m not here to take the sticks out of these guys’ hands, but there’s got to be an identity [of] how we want to play … we want to be a hard team to play against.”
Briefly a Maple Leaf during his playing career as a no-nonsense winger, Berube was the last member of the Leafs hierarchy to appear before the media Wednesday. He is expecting a competitive camp, and while he has been sketching out line combinations on a variety of napkins and notepads since he was hired on May 17, he said he plans to use Nylander as a centre to open camp, likely with Max Domi on one of his wings.
No stranger to blowing the doors off dressing rooms with his colourful language, Berube not-so-subtly sent a message to his players about what they can expect for the next eight – and they hope, nine – months.
“You can control two things in my opinion – your work and your compete,” he said. “When players aren’t working and they’re not competing, they’re going to have an issue, okay? That’s unacceptable in my opinion.
“The biggest thing is when the players start really holding each other accountable in the locker room. That’s when you know you’ve got something.”
Given the way the past Leafs’ season ended, with Boston’s David Pastrnak blowing past a coasting Marner to score the Game 7 overtime winner, it might not be a stretch to think that Toronto’s all-star right winger might be a strange fit for Berube’s system. But the coach stoically chose to stay in the present moment.
“Well, that’s in the past,” he said. “I’m new here, obviously, and I’ve been around Mitch a bunch. He’s a great person. He’s a great two-way player. He’s been up for a Selke, he puts up numbers every year and, going into the playoffs, it’s building up to there. We’re not there yet.”
Marner, like Tavares, enters the new season – his ninth with the Maple Leafs – with one year to go on the six-year contract extension he signed in 2019. Though he declined to discuss his contract – which will count US$10.9-million against the salary cap this year – he said he has tried to stay away from social media over the summer, as the native of nearby Thornhill, Ont., bore much of brunt of fan criticism for another early playoff exit. Marner had just three points in the seven-games series.
Instead, Marner spent some time this summer in Vail, Colo., training and skating with Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon, an experience he said “makes you just really want to up your game even more.”
His dedication to improvement – and possibly securing a long-term future with his hometown club – hasn’t gone unnoticed by the team front office.
“Mitch has always been a very committed person and very committed hockey player,” Shanahan said. “But I think when you see the work he puts in, and you see his love for the game and his love for the city of Toronto, that’s what helps you believe in a guy like Mitch Marner.”
General manager Brad Treliving – who sat next to Shanahan on stage – said he was very happy with the team’s off-season additions, which include adding defencemen Chris Tanev, Jani Hakanpaa and Oliver Ekman-Larsson – all 6-foot-2 plus – and goaltender Anthony Stolarz, who will compete with Joseph Woll for the starting assignment.
“As far as what gives me hope, I think we’ve improved our roster,” Treliving said. “You don’t hit grand slams every day; sometimes you just got to keep getting singles and doubles and picking away at your roster.”
Part of that improvement will come internally, as some of the team’s young prospects will look to impress Treliving and Berube over the next couple of weeks and through the Leafs’ preseason schedule, which begins Sunday at home to the Ottawa Senators.
But while players such as 2023 first-round draft pick Easton Cowan, who was awarded the OHL’s most-valuable-player trophy for both the regular season and playoffs, and 2023 KHL rookie of the year Nikita Grebyonkin look to create opportunities to launch their careers at this level, Treliving gave them a simple word of advice.
“I don’t buy into the path part,” he said. “It’s the NHL. So if you can help us win, I don’t care if you’re 18 or you’re 38. Play well.”