‘He was never protected by his organization’: Agent Ferris speaks on Marner’s exit with Leafs

Mitch Marner’s exit from the Toronto Maple Leafs has been well documented, but perhaps there is a lot more to what happened in the fallout between the two parties than meets the eye.

Marner’s agent, Darren Ferris, joined The PuckPedia Hockey Show to talk about some of his clients, including Marner and how things fell apart in Toronto.

“It’s unfortunate in Toronto the way things went right from the get-go,” said Ferris. “I think people think this whole story with Mitch started with his contract negotiation. That’s not really where it started.

“Back when he first signed with the Leafs, at his entry level, they did not want him to have performance bonuses in there. Mitch decided he would help the team out. They asked him to. I had some pressures from guys that were working for the London Knights and also working for the Leafs pressuring him to sign. And eventually Mitch just told me, ‘Darren, I want to sign this’. So against my wishes, he did.”

During Lou Lamoriello’s tenure as general manager of the Leafs, he refused to give rookies significant performance bonuses, a standard he held with both Marner and fellow Leafs top prospect William Nylander, with both players only getting $850,000 in performance bonuses.

However, that changed in 2016, when Lamoriello gave first-overall pick Auston Matthews $2.85 million in performance bonuses, something that did not sit well with Marner and Ferris.

“They promised nobody [would] get [performance bonuses],” said Ferris. “As you know, they didn’t fulfill that. He soon found out that a promise that isn’t in the contract isn’t a promise, it’s a tactic. So nobody ever talks about the fact that Mitch did the team a favor back then.”

That problem boiled over into 2019, when Marner’s entry-level contract was up and he needed a new contract. After Matthews had signed to a $11.639 million cap hit earlier in the season, Marner insisted on a similar price, and did not budge after how he was treated with his ELC. That negotiation became somewhat public, particularly through Ferris and Marner’s father, which rubbed many hockey fans the wrong way.

“There was a lot of misinformation, which just kept spiraling into a lot of information that made him the villain here in the city to that point,” said Ferris. “To this day, I think that he still gets attacked. I think the majority of people support him, but there’s always those ones that are fanatic about it. Frankly, as time went on, Mitch became the focus of everything, scrutinized for every game, him and his family criticized after every loss, and at points receiving threats on social media, which was disturbing. I received plenty of disparaging comments and misguided reports myself. You got to remember Mitch was carjacked in Toronto.”

This all built up to a boiling point when the Leafs’ playoff struggles continued every year, and Marner was the face of those problems. Despite leading the team in playoff points during their nine-season postseason streak, he was often held off the scoresheet in important games, leading him to become the team scapegoat.

“Every year the team came up short, he was the one singled out,” said Ferris. “It’s funny because hockey is a team game. You can’t pinpoint one person. This is a guy that had the most playoff points on the team and who played through a fractured ankle in the Boston series there. He really bled for that team and he was never protected by his organization, in my opinion.”

Another notable issue towards the end of Marner’s tenure was a rumour that he had refused a trade to the Carolina Hurricanes, which would have gotten the Leafs Mikko Rantanen in return. But according to Ferris, that situation played a lot differently than what was reported.

“Much was made of the Carolina proposal that Brad Treliving put in front of him,” said Ferris. “Nobody had the real information that was out there. There was never a trade in place. It was a suggestion put to Mitch. Would he go to Carolina if a trade would be consummated. People forget the timing. Mitch’s wife was pregnant, about to give birth to their firstborn son. That is not a moment any player is comfortable with being traded.

“Here’s really what people don’t know. Through that year, Brad Treliving and I sat down a couple of times and discussed Mitch’s situation. I tabled a lot of concerns and said we’d wait and see how the year played out before entering into any contract discussions. And I think that Carolina event of what happened, I don’t think helped the situation, and I think there was no real effort by the organization to rectify any of the concerns.

“At one point I even positioned, and that was early in the year, that Brad maybe look at opportunities for a trade if he wasn’t comfortable in waiting, and if they wanted to trade Mitch, he would consider going to the Western Conference. It wasn’t just Vegas at that time. Honestly, I felt they always wanted to trade him regardless. I think just the whole Carolina episode was the catalyst here. It was perceived differently in the media.”

And in the end, it all led to his eventual departure from the Leafs, as he was signed and traded to the Vegas Golden Knights. But even then led to some criticism towards Marner, particularly about how he had quit on the Leafs well before the season end, with some reports indicating he had made up his mind on Vegas quite a while before actually leaving. However, Ferris refuted those claims.

“The rumors that he always wanted to go there are not true,” said Ferris. “Everyone said, ‘oh, they were shopping for a house in Vegas’. Well, that’s not true. When guys are in different towns, they look around. They’re always looking at different places they go to.

“Someone else put out something about there being tampering. There was no tampering whatsoever that everyone kept putting on social media. Vegas does a great job. Kelly McCrimmon, George McPhee, quality people. They’ve been nothing but aces. They’ve treated Mitch and his family very well, protected them whenever misinformation was in the public. And at the end of the day, they got one of the world’s best players and an even better human being.”

Ultimately, Marner got the last laugh in the situation. While the Leafs struggled without Marner in the lineup, finishing with the fifth-worst record in the NHL, Marner and the Golden Knights went all the way to the Stanley Cup Final before losing to the Carolina Hurricanes. Marner played a key role in that playoff run with 10 goals and 29 points in 22 games.