Lost In Translation

Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate that the best way to deal with a problem is to just attack it head on. Avoiding it does nothing but delay the inevitable. The more you try to avoid it, the more it eats away at you. To ease your pain simply commit to attacking the elephant in the room.

With the Toronto Maple Leafs this is more akin to a herd of elephants and is an issue that team management has always failed to properly address. The particular predicament being that Toronto hasn’t won a Stanley Cup since 1967 and, to extend the explanation even further, wearing the Leaf’s jersey comes with an enormous amount of pressure.

Like it or not, the problem is made much worse when the player is Canadian or from Ontario or heaven forbid, from Toronto itself.

In reality though, most hockey fans only know this dilemma more as a burden of pain and grief passed on from an earlier generation (or two). The pain is not so much the player’s burden - given that they are only twenty somethings who can’t grasp the true scope of the issue - but more of one passed onto them from someone who has either felt the pain directly or been a bearer of it as well.

To be fair, these young players have no direct knowledge of the despair, only that it will come across as ongoing trauma structured like old war stories. Despite this distance created by time and space the fact remains that anyone who wears the blue and white carries with them the unyielding pressure of having to exhume ghosts they had nothing to do with creating.

There are constant reminders of the ghosts of old from the Toronto media and the Toronto faithful but these young players can do little more than act like paramedics arriving at an accident scene fifty years too late.

Again?

It’s not that they don’t care about the Stanley Cup drought, it’s just that obsessing about it will do absolutely nothing but add unnecessary weight to the burden. Team management fails the players by not just letting players play. The ghosts are management’s responsibility.

Because of this, players have the option of either trying to ignore it or finding a way out of town. For some though, their escape is a blissful ignorance of the burden’s very existence. For some, this is all new to them.

Enter Nikita Grebenkin, a 2022, 5th round draft choice from Serov, Russia who has hit the team like a double shot of vodka. Grebenkin, who is learning English, famously repeated the age-old hockey mantra of “Forecheck, backcheck, paycheque” exuberantly to the glee of the Toronto fans and media.

With Grebenkin we are reminded of the cure and not the affliction.

That a player can enter the NHL with this kind of youthful swagger in the serious yet dour hockey mecca of Toronto speaks to both the infectious confidence of the player and the contrast in perspectives.

Twenty one year old kids - and non-Canadians to be more specific - shouldn’t be so charmingly cocky. This is Toronto after all. Has no idea the mountain he’s about to climb?

Does he not see how hockey is life and death here and that “The Center of the Hockey Universe” has been yearning for someone, anyone, to lead them back to The Promised Land?

Can he not appreciate that this particular struggle (note: do not dare to publicly acknowledge this in any way) has gone beyond the ridiculous? Does he not see that the Leafs (again, never acknowledge this publicly) that the Rangers and the Red Wings and the Blues and the Bruins and the Black Hawks, and even the new teams who weren’t even around in 1967(!), have all achieved Stanley Cup glory (at least once) while Toronto remains stalled at base camp?

Rosiland Liang/The Varsity

No frankly. Grebenkin likely knows very little about this history. He knows hockey. He knows forecheck, backcheck and paycheque. His English lessons haven’t yet arrived at the chapter about the team he plays for being mired in this enormous struggle to return to hockey supremacy.

He has no idea of the weight he’s being asked to carry. It’s nothing more than just a game and it’s never been more than just a game.

Win? Lose? Just play. It’s time Leafs Nation learned that language.

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