Don’t buy into the Tavares to Toronto hype just yet

You know it’s the offseason when out-of-nowhere rhetoric takes over the local airwaves. Specifically, the talk of the hockey town in Toronto over the past few days has been New York Islanders forward John Tavares, and his future with that team. Now, that’s not a particularly new story; the Oakville native has been linked to the organization since before he played his first NHL game, as the Leafs both tried to sign him to an AHL deal in his draft year, and publicly attempted to trade up for him in 2009. Since signing his current six-year extension with the Islanders in 2011, fans from across the GTA have been counting down the days until their prodigal son comes home.

It’s hard to blame them. Tavares spent his youth being hyped up as an elite, generational-tier talent. Exceptional Status, a 70 goal OHL season, and legendary performances for the Canadian National Team all encouraged that hype, and while his NHL career didn’t quite keep up with it, he’s still been evolved into one of the NHL’s most dependable forwards of the past decade, doing so for pennies on the dollar while playing for an inconsistent and often confusing team and organization.

Which brings us to the most recent of gossip, sparked by TSN analyst Craig Button on local radio, involving a route that Tavares may take. Specifically, the idea is that he would sign a one-year deal with the Maple Leafs for the 2018/19 season as a “go for it” type move.

Button’s logic behind it was pretty straightforward. The Leafs are going to be very good over the next few seasons, they’ll have one more year after this one where they can sign top-end talent on a temporary basis, and Mike Babcock has precedent with mercenary players, with his Detroit Red Wings having signed Marian Hossa in 2008.

It sounds great on the surface, right? Tavares joins a team that’s already stacked, and if they haven’t won the cup this year, he’ll be one of many hometown players to be on the team that ends the drought, instantly deifying him, making him infinitely valuable on the open market the next time around, and probably locking him into the Hockey Hall of Fame without doubt.

The Leafs would obviously love the arrangement too. It gives them a superstar at no asset cost, and they don’t have to worry about post-prime years. Now that the big three all look like they’re going to be stars in their own right, finding guys to latch on in the moment is key. Personally, I was in support of this model last summer, with this offseason being the goal and players like (pre-extension) Brent Burns, Kevin Shattenkirk, Joe Thornton, Alexander Radulov, and Patrick Marleau being the targets.

Most saw it as silly talk until Toronto made a strong impression in their playoff series against Washington, and the Leafs themselves did try to execute on it, landing Marleau on a three-but-really-two year deal and putting up a good fight with Thornton. This, of course, comes after swinging at Steven Stamkos in the offseason prior; they’re no strangers to the whole “make the big pitch if you can get the right price” game.

So for me, I’m all in on offering John Tavares a 1-year contract for whatever he wants. I would like nothing more than for one of my all-time favourite players to follow to join the team I spend the most time watching, and it would be hilarious to have to talk about late-prime Nazem Kadri as the best fourth line centre in the history of the NHL. But the feasibility of this actually happening?

Button brought up Kevin Durant as the most direct comparable, which I don’t think is fair given that the NBA is tailored more towards short or option-laden deals as their TV and merchandising contracts push the cap upward. Not to mention, it’s a league that values it’s superstars much more than the NHL does (“league max” is mentioned in a contract signing about as frequently per offseason month in the NBA as it is per decade in the NHL), and is more accepting of superstar players jumping to different teams to find ideal situations.

Even still, Durant took a lot of flak throughout the season for being a Top-5 player joining a historically great team in hopes of winning a championship, which sounds nothing at all like the NHL. This is a league where fans and media seemingly pressured Connor McDavid, the league’s 20-year-old reigning MVP, scoring title winner, and posessor of one of the greatest career openings in the entire history of the game, to take less money than an already lower-than-deserved total to leave room for his teammates, and where the aforementioned Hossa was mocked exceedingly for deciding to jump ship and failing miserably in his ring pursuit (read: losing Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals by a goal, literally as close as he could’ve gotten without success).

Forget injury risk, the league isn’t in a proper state of mind for the legacy risk of a prime aged superstar to give up his C to join a superpower. There’s a reason why the list of players worth over $5 million per year who left their previous team to join another on a 1-year contract in the past 11 years looks like this:

Peter Forsberg, 2007

Marian Hossa, 2008

Mats Sundin, 2009

Alexander Semin, 2012

Daniel Alfredsson, 2013

Forsberg was at the end of his career and went back to a former team. Sundin and Alfredsson were also at their end and forced out of Toronto and Ottawa by rebuild attempts. The Capitals walked away from Semin in a way that had people believing that he had irreparable character issues. Put that way, Hossa was Button’s best example of a situation that could work because it’s the only scenario where this has happened in the cap era, and Tavares would be the first North American to do it.

That last half shouldn’t matter, but knowing what we know about hockey culture on this continent, you know it would.

So we’re pinning a very, very untravelled road here on Tavares. Keep in mind that we’re talking about someone often talked about as a shy, lead-by-example type player, who tries to stay out of the spotlight if it’s not necessary and will only accept being the centre of attention if it involves one of his goals; at which point he’ll still try to downplay it.

Unless he’s that unconfident in his ability to win a Stanley Cup in the next decade and a half, or he’s that desperate to take a short-term money grab in lieu of long-term stability, or there’s some secret X factor that could lure him into the club, I really don’t think that Tavares is the type of player that’s going to make the next Hossa-like leap of faith. It doesn’t matter that he should, it doesn’t matter that other’s should, but this combination of culture in the sport, the market in pursuit, and player in demand doesn’t really scream “probable fit” to me.

Not to mention, this is all before we get to the theory that the only reason he hasn’t signed yet is to give keep his front office committed to improvement and the local government a little more interested in showing commitment to a new arena. For now, I think it’s still a pretty safe bet to assume he’ll stick with the team he’s familiar with in the high-amenity yet less-microscopic market that is New York.

NOTE: Typically, weekend articles are a subscribers-only feature, but I made an exception today because last week was slower than I planned it to be.

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