Marner’s return showed the Leafs miss him more than he misses them
If Friday played out like a rabid Toronto Maple Leafs fan’s dream, it would’ve been the magical night that made Mitch Marner wish so badly they were still his NHL team. The boos would’ve rained down on him mercilessly with every puck touch, bringing a rush of memories of past failures during his nine seasons in the Blue and White, making him bobble the biscuit indecisively. Maybe a former teammate would lay him out with an open-ice hit for good measure. And the Leafs would lay a beating on the Vegas Golden Knights, showing Marner the grass was so much greener back in his home city.
But these are the Leafs, a franchise so star-crossed that their Stanley Cup drought predates franchises almost 60 years old that have never won it. We know the scenario rarely if ever plays out like the fantasy here. And it took one minute and six seconds to dump a bucket of icy water on Toronto’s collective head Friday night, when Jack Eichel deposited a perfect feed from Mark Stone into a wide-open cage to put Vegas up 1-0. Oh, crap, that’s right, there was a hockey game to play.
Marner was booed loudly in his first return game since last June’s sign-and-trade departure, as expected, to start and finish his pre-game warmup, then at every puck touch. But while his video tribute during the first period was drowned out at first by jeers, the cheers slowly rose up and won the tug of war. Those fleeting few seconds of ovation gave him a happy moment to remember and undermined any victory the boo birds hoped to gain Friday night at Scotiabank Arena.
“Passionate fan base here. They love their team. It was interesting the whole night, and I really appreciate the love and support through the tribute video,” Marner said. “I’ve still got a lot of love for these fans…I was trying to just take it in and not get emotional.”
“That was awesome,” Stone said. “We’ve been through it a couple of times with returns, especially with Jack [Eichel’s] in Buffalo, we were kind of used to it. So we knew what to expect, whether it was gonna be good or bad, but I thought the fans were great. They gave [Marner] a great ovation that I firmly believe he deserved. He put in nine good years, but then once the puck dropped, the competitiveness came out. He doesn’t play for the Maple Leafs anymore, but they tipped their cap to what he did for this organization, which was awesome to see.”
That mixed crowed reaction at the game’s most hyped moment was a reminder that, really, nothing is absolute in sports, including fan base vitriol. There was no way all 19,305 in attendance were going to express the same emotion at the same time, and it turns out a large percentage didn’t feel like showing animosity toward the franchise’s No. 6 all-time scorer.
The best way to stick it to Marner, then, would’ve been to beat him on the scoreboard. And the Leafs couldn’t do that.
They had a chance to make a statement on their home ice and show Marner exactly what he was missing. Instead, they came out of a 6-3 loss looking like a team that sure could’ve used Marner, one of the NHL’s best all-around regular-season players, an elite takeaway artist, playmaker and dressing-room cheerleader. The Leafs trailed 2-0 after a flat first period in which they put just five pucks on net. After a John Tavares tally energized the crowd to open the second, Vegas struck twice in succession, taking advantage of rusty goaltender Anthony Stolarz, making his first start since Nov. 11, with Pavel Dorofeyev catching him swimming for the third goal and Braeden Bowman beating him with a clean wrister less than two minutes later.
Toronto pushed back with a pretty Scott Laughton breakaway goal and a Bobby McMann redirection goal, exiting the second period down 4-3, but the rally ended there. Stone took over the third period, icing the game at the 15:11 mark by finishing off a 2-on-1 feed from Ivan Barbashev, then adding an empty netter.
The Leafs’ mostly flat performance was a stark reminder of what’s actually important at this urgent point of their season: wins. And that made the concept of booing Marner seem, frankly, trivial in hindsight.
The Leaf fans might have enjoyed their pound of flesh Friday night. But the high from it will be fleeting. Just look at how the narrative around NBA star Vince Carter slowly morphed back into a positive one as his career wound down. He wasn’t a villain anymore by the time he returned to have his number honored by the Toronto Raptors in 2024. The best “revenge” they ever got was to win a championship without him, as they did in 2018-19. And the Leafs can learn a lot from that as they struggle to hang in the Eastern Conference Wildcard race. The plan to replace Marner in the aggregate with depth additions, from Nicolas Roy to Matias Maccelli to Dakota Joshua, hasn’t worked. The Leafs have their lowest points percentage since 2015-16, the year they won the NHL Draft Lottery and selected Auston Matthews first overall. They’re also weathering an endless parade of injuries, minus crucial contributors such as right winger William Nylander and defenseman Chris Tanev. They’re playing high-stakes hockey pretty much every night as a team in danger of missing the playoffs, so maybe that will sharpen them if they can squeak in as a low seed. But the only thing they showed Marner Friday is that they’re in tough to keep their contention window propped open without him.
“Every game’s really important, we’re fighting for a spot, and we’ve come home here and we haven’t gotten the results we needed, so we have to look in the mirror here and realize that coming off of a pretty good road trip, we haven’t been able to follow it up,” Tavares said.
As Marner put it Friday after the game, he’s glad he doesn’t have to talk about his return anymore and suspects his ex-teammates are too. It turns out they were the distracted ones more than he was Friday. The boo birds got their moment, yes, but Marner is 2-0 against his former team now, and that’s all that matters.
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