The Return of Harold Ballard

As the saying goes, when it rains, it pours, and it certainly did on the Toronto Maple Leafs in the third period against the San Jose Sharks on Saturday night.

After building a comfortable 2-0 lead early in the second period on face-off dot blast by Pavel Kubina, San Jose coach Ron Wilson juggled his lines, tipping the balance considerably in the Sharks’ favour. San Jose piled on the pressure as the game wore on, leading one to think that if they just broke down the door to Vesa Toskala’s net, the game would be theirs. Sure enough, a power play goal early in the third by Patrick Marleau set the tone for the rest of the game, setting up a Craig Rivet blast on a 5-on-3 (spurred by an obvious cross-checking call on Toronto’s roaming pylon Hal Gill) and a poorly-contested Joe Pavelski tip-in off a Jonathan Cheechoo shot that gave San Jose the deserved 3-2 win. Following the game, a visibly shaken Paul Maurice, Toronto’s head coach, held back the tears in vehemently stammering that the Leafs didn’t lose because of a lack of effort and you’d be hard-pressed to prove him wrong, since the third period clearly proved that San Jose was better than Toronto on more than just paper. Still, the loss did the Leafs no favours, as it dropped Toronto to 28th overall in the NHL and seven points behind the New York Islanders for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.

To be fair, very few people thought Toronto would be a Stanley Cup contender this season, and, given the team’s late runs at playoff berths the past two seasons, the Leafs might not be dead yet anyway. However, it was hoped that the acquisition of the steady Toskala would counteract two straight seasons of ineffective goaltending and raise Toronto’s level of play, and while Toskala has lived up to his billing, Toronto’s level of play didn’t rise at all, as Toronto’s wonky defensive play has been shown to be much worse than many might have thought. Thus, the prospect of another season out of the playoffs has led to a cavalcade of suggestions for what to do with the Leafs, from trading Mats Sundin for youth to the firing of both Maurice and lame-duck General Manager John Ferguson, Jr., but the Leaf fans’ vitriol is misdirected. They really should be targeting themselves.

The reasoning here is quite simple: Leaf ownership has returned to the days of Harold Ballard, where they didn’t care about a successful team as long as the product remained profitable, and the only way to respond is to stay away in droves. It wasn’t always this way- you may recall the non-interventionist ownership of Steve Stavro, whose management led to a reinvigoration of the Leafs on the ice in 1992-93, a season after his takeover. Those early successes went to waste by poor personnel decisions by Stavro’s hired gun, Cliff Fletcher, and by the time Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment became an entertainment conglomerate with the acquisition of the Toronto Raptors in 1996, the Leafs’ fate was sealed. Despite having four teams get to the conference finals (1993, 1994, 1999 and 2002), the Leafs never really did ice a team considered by many to be solid Stanley Cup contender, appearing content to ice a team that would at least look like a solid contender to keep the mirage of ’93 magic alive but, deep down, everyone knew it didn’t stand a chance. Meanwhile, MLSE kept raising ticket prices telling fans it was willing to build a great team while visibly keeping its character- “hey, Gary Roberts and Shayne Corson are marketable characters, let’s go get them even though they’re washed up! Yeah! And Ed Belfour too! Who cares if their best years are behind them? At least they’ll keep those playoff dates coming!”

Now, after careful posturing for over a decade, it appears that MLSE is coming out of its shell and openly admitting to its own intentional mismanagement. That is the only logical conclusion one can draw after president and CEO Richard Peddie felt it was needed to remind curious reporters that Ferguson does not have the power to execute any major personnel decisions, including trading Sundin and firing Maurice, unless the MLSE board of directors approves the deal. Such a comment harkens back to the micromanaging days of Ballard, only this time it is marked with casual indifference to hockey affairs instead of being rooted in deep-seated contempt like it was for Ballard. Granted, Ferguson is far from the only Leafs GM to face MLSE’s Byzantine decision-making process- you may recall Pat Quinn faced a similar dilemma regarding free-agent acquisitions- but now, with the team in turmoil just begging for a major change, MLSE folds its arms like a stubborn child and simply screams “no!”

One would think that the Leafs’ problems on the ice should be enough to sway MLSE’s opinion that a major change is needed, but since MLSE mismanagement is so well rooted and well established in the hockey department, the fact that basketball is a much more profitable sport than hockey (why else do you think Bryan Colangelo is Raptors GM?) and that MLSE itself is obscenely profitable (in early 2008, it was valued at $1.5 billion, with the Leafs being pegged at $413 million), there’s no reason to suggest that MLSE should have any interest in seriously rebuilding the team. Otherwise, long ago, when the Toronto Star asked readers during the lean years of the 1990s if they’d follow a young, promising (but losing) Leafs team and the readership vehemently responded “Yes!”, MLSE would have actually bothered to bring in top-level scouts, a GM with a pedigree for producing young talent (how about Randy Sexton, Darcy Regier or Ken Holland? All those were available in the mid-1990s) and a coach with a pedigree for grooming young talent (Mike Babcock, Andy Murray, maybe?). If MLSE wasn’t going to do it then, why should they do it now?

Thus, there can only be two reasonable solutions to the problem- one is to buy MLSE, but since most Leaf fans probably don’t have $1.5 billion lying around, that option is out of the question. The other is for Leaf fans just to stay away, like fans do in other cities when their team doesn’t perform. While it’s true that the bulk of the tickets- mostly the prime ones- are owned by corporations, there still are enough seats to produce a noticeable difference in crowd volume, and there’s still no reason why those tickets have to be used. Leaf fans don’t even have to stay away the rest of the season- if, even for just one day, Leaf fans staged a massive ticket-refund drive and forced Toronto to play in front of an empty stadium for a single game they’ll force a public relations nightmare so big for MLSE that they’ll just have to start paying attention to them. Fans do have more power than they think- it’s time for them to use it.

The fact of the matter is, quick fixes and placing confidence in an ownership group that hasn’t exhibited any reason to be trusted won’t solve the problem, as both Ballard and MLSE has profited on Leaf fans’ naïveté for decades. Thus, if Leaf fans really want to enact a change, they’ve got to show they’re more than just docile lapdogs who’ll eat up anything management tells them even though they’ve shown they’ve never delivered. They have to show they won’t put up with anymore of their rhetorical nonsense and have to start demanding better from their owners, and they can show that first by staying away. As long as MLSE sees a full arena they’ll think the fans are satisfied since they’re paying MLSE for the tickets, so the obvious reaction is to simply return them, as that is a real act of dissatisfaction. Otherwise, Leaf fans might just have to wait another 40 years before Lord Stanley’s Mug gets paraded down Yonge Street if they ever get to do it at all.

-DG