Two years ago, the Toronto Maple Leafs sat down with Steven Stamkos, but, by their own admission, blew it. “Within two minutes,” one member of the organization later said, “we knew we’d lost him.”
That presentation focused on “the hometown boy’s return” and “this is how you can make even more money by playing in Toronto.” It was, by all accounts, a total whiff. This time, they were determined to avoid the previous mistake. “The focus for us with John was only on hockey,” Dubas told the 31 Thoughts podcast last July. “That was the major thing that we wanted our focus to be…. ‘Here’s who we are as a hockey team,’ and ‘Here’s who we are as a program to help you reach your potential.’ ‘Here’s what we do on the development side.’
“If you rewind it [to] two years ago, we were going in and saying, ‘Here’s what we are going to become,’ and ‘Here’s what we intend to be,’ so it was trying to sell them on what we intended to be as an organization that had just finished in last place and picked first overall, versus now in 2018…. It was much easier…. To me, it has to be always about hockey. The periphery stuff that comes with playing in whatever market it is, that’s up to the player and his representative in terms of what he does and doesn’t want to do.”
Toronto pushed hard on the practical reasons for Tavares to come — the talent in the organization; the young core of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander. But the Maple Leafs also pulled some emotional strings.