Phil Kessel has been the Incredible Shrinking Man since he first set foot in Toronto.

After the formal portion of his introductory news conference on that September night in 2009, held on a Saturday just before a pre-season game against the Philadelphia Flyers in what is normally the media dining room at the Air Canada Centre, Kessel was surrounded by reporters and cameras. Pressed up against the wall, fidgeting, he seemed to get smaller and smaller and smaller with each question.

I remember thinking then that for a guy who liked to come across as master of the NHL universe, Brian Burke seemed to have landed precisely the type of player who would be eaten up in Toronto.

But I also realized that the Toronto Maple Leafs as constituted had little measurable talent; I believed Kessel was the type of player Burke, then the Leafs general manager, was going to have to get at some point. So why not then? Plus … well, this was Brian Burke, right? And although the cost was high – two first-round draft picks and a second – this was when many of us (and many of you) believed the combination of Burke’s personality and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Ltd.’s, money meant the Leafs were going to simply bully their way to the Stanley Cup.

Burke told Toronto four months earlier that he was prepared to move heaven and earth to trade up to get a shot at John Tavares. Didn’t happen, but the way Burke talked about it only seemed a matter of time before every free-agent and every Ontario-born player was going to be crawling over broken glass to play for the Leafs.

This was before anybody really understood how the NHL’s salary cap had effectively removed the biggest weapon from the Leafs arsenal – the ability to spend as much as possible in order to cover up mistakes. This was when we all wanted to – no, NEEDED TO – believe.

And look where we are now: one hundred and seventy-four goals, 374 points and two coaches later, Kessel has become the personification of an unlikeable and most importantly unworkable core of players – more, it seems, within the hockey community than with the fanbase.

His former coach, Ron Wilson, has effectively said he’s uncoachable and TV’s Mike Milbury chimed in on Wednesday from afar saying he’s a “pain in the ass.” There are people in the hockey community who tell tales out of school about how unpopular Kessel was with his U.S. Olympic teammates in Sochi, but few will do so publicly. I’m sure that’s coming, soon.

And of course, there’s the whole thing with assistant coach Steve Spott telling a coaches clinic that Kessel “hated coaches.”

We need to talk about this: truth is, I don’t care what Wilson says, and neither should you. He hasn’t set foot in the dressing room for more than two years and was such a flop here when it came to managing personalities that his point of view is worthy only for its amusement value. Interesting that it took Wilson this long to find his courage.

As for Milbury, using the full moral suasion that comes with being one of the worst general managers in the history of the sport as well as a reputation within both his old and new industry for chronic mis-diagnosis? Yeah, I’m going to take his word about anything …

No, of all the stuff that has spewed forth in the past two days from the gaping wound that is the Maple Leafs, it is defenceman Roman Polak’s words to our Chris Johnston that matter the most – because they weren’t the normal mind-numbing platitudes we get from this group, because they come from a guy who’s a beast when it counts and because he’s played for a better organization, the St. Louis Blues.

Johnston asked Polak why the Leafs were a clueless defensive team. “Because it’s hard work,” Polak told him. “It’s always tough to do something you know you don’t like to do. I think we have lots of guys that just want to play offence.”

Lots of guys, to be sure: but my guess is 99.9 percent of people reading that statement have taken “lots of guys” to be Phil Kessel, Phil Kessel and Phil Kessel. That’s not entirely untrue, of course: Kessel can float with the best of them and when that is coupled with some of the worst on-ice or on-field body-language this city has ever seen – tongue-dragging, gasping for air, bent over at the waist – he’s an easy target.

But here’s the thing about Kessel: I don’t believe he was meant to be the centre-piece to this team. I don’t believe Burke thought that when he made the deal for him and I’m not even certain David Nonis thought that when he gave him an eight-year, $64-million extension. Kessel was brought here to score goals; he was extended to score goals.

I don’t see the failure of the Leafs these past three years as a failure of Kessel: I see it as an organizational failure to put the right players around Kessel – to maximize his potential as an elite complementary player. Kessel’s contract will be tough to move, but it’s much less of an issue than Dion Phaneuf’s or David Clarkson’s.

Look: this is going to sound off coming from a member of the sports media, but I don’t care about Kessel’s relationship with reporters. It would be great if he could recite Shakespeare and be really deep and be a master of the verbal nudge-nudge, wink-wink but he’s just not very comfortable talking to a group of cameras and tape recorders and note-pads. It would be great if he was a telegenic guy like PK Subban or at least mastered the ability to be nice and not say a damned thing on a nightly basis, which is the hallmark of so many NHL players.

No, I really don’t care how Phil Kessel is with us or what Ron Wilson or Mike Milbury thinks of him and given what we’re starting to learn about his teammates I’m not all that certain I care what the majority of them think about him, either.

The key to making it work with Kessel is ensuring that his quirks and weaknesses and flaws remain benign and intrude only now and then on the ice. It’s been apparent, frankly, since Day 1 that the price to pay for Kessel wasn’t going to end with his acquisition. He seems very much today the same guy and the same player he was when he arrived here. More than anything, he has suffered from other people’s lack of consistency.

That might not be a popular opinion, but I think somebody needs to throw it out there at this time instead of just piling on.