And what about Leafs prospects playing for other nations? Well, it’s not much better. During the 2012 World Juniors played in Calgary and Edmonton, the Leafs had but a single prospect, Swedish defenceman Petter Granberg, a solid if unspectacular player who eventually won gold with the rest of his teammates. In fact, Granberg was on the ice when countryman Mika Zibanejad scored the overtime winner against Russia. As a result, Granberg’s image was widely shown on highlights and in newspaper and website pictures in the aftermath of Sweden’s first gold medal at the event in some thirty years. Zibanejad, who belonged to the Ottawa Senators, is a much brighter prospect, but at least Granberg was able to bask in the glow of his much more celebrated teammate.
In the past three decades of World Junior tournaments, Colaiacovo and Swedish defenceman Kenny Jonsson are the only elite World Junior performers whose rights were owned by the Leafs during the competition who remained with the Leafs to start their NHL careers. Jonsson, like Colaiacovo, became a very solid NHL player, but he, too, was traded away, in the move that brought Wendel Clark back to Toronto in 1996.
Two other defencemen whom the Leafs owned the rights to — Finn Janne Gronvall and Swede Pierre Hedin — played well enough to earn World Junior all-star honours at two different tournaments in the 1990s. But neither ended up playing regularly in the NHL. Hedin had his moments, but as a smallish, slick defenceman, he came along at a time when the NHL game, and especially Pat Quinn, the Leafs coach at the time, demanded much bigger players. After a year of playing on the Leafs’ AHL affiliate in St. John’s, no doubt puzzled at the Newfoundlanders’ accents just as much as the Leafs’ indifference at playing him on the big club, Hedin hightailed it back to Sweden. Not exactly the big one that got away, but Hedin’s story could have been different had he come along a few years later.
All told, if you accept the premise that the World Juniors tend to identify the best teenage hockey players in the world, the Leafs have acted like a middle-aged schoolteacher with little or no interest in the best and brightest pupils before him; at very least, they’ve done an incredibly bad job identifying them.
And that’s just the World Juniors. The Leafs’ contribution to other elite world hockey competition has been just as modest. The lone significant NHL tournament where the Maple Leafs had a wide representation was at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City when Toronto hit the proverbial mother lode: Curtis Joseph (Canada), Tomas Kaberle (Czech Republic), Alex Ponikarovsky (Ukraine), Robert Reichel (Czech Republic), Mikael Renberg, Mats Sundin, and Mikael Tellqvist (all Sweden) represented their respective countries; Alex Mogilny would have played for Russia had he not been hurt just before the NHL schedule broke for the Olympics. Aside from that rather impressive contingent, Maple Leafs’ involvement in other significant tournaments has been rather modest.
Of course, both Leafs and Team Canada fans of a certain age will never forget Paul Henderson’s Summit Series winner in 1972 or Darryl Sittler’s goal four years later in the Canada Cup. Both men played for Toronto at the time of those dramatic tournament-clinching goals.
Much has changed in the international arena since the 1970s; the world game is now a much more mature and different beast and it has left Leafs players largely out in the cold. The result? When a major competition is going on, Toronto fans can sit back and watch dreamy-eyed. Those taking part are almost assuredly not Maple Leafs.
Aside from the Henderson and Sittler examples cited above, the most memorable Canadian hockey moments of recent times are any combination of the three Canada Cup triumphs between 1984 and 1991 and the two Olympic gold medals won by the men’s team in 2002 and 2010. Non-Canadian triumphs in that era of note: the U.S. victory in the 1996 World Cup of Hockey and the Czech and Swedish triumphs at the 1998 and 2006 Olympics, respectively. Leafs involvement? Aside from Sundin’s pivotal role in Sweden’s long-overdue win, that sound you’re hearing is crickets (defenceman Aki Berg played for 2006 silver-medal winners, Finland).
Even the U.S. “Miracle on Ice” team, a squad that later sent so many players to the NHL after winning Olympic gold at Lake Placid in 1980, had nary a Leafs prospect on it.
But there is a quaint ritual that takes place at the Air Canada Centre after successful World Junior tournaments and also after the Salt Lake Olympics. It’s the honouring at centre ice of the returning Canadian heroes, gold medals draped around their necks. The glint from the gold baubles almost takes the sting from the salt in the wounds being felt as the players are introduced. On many occasions during Canada’s World Junior run of gold medals from 2005 to 2009, Leafs fans were even forced to endure more than a few young Canucks walking out to centre ice knowing full well that (1) this kid is going to be beating us some day (see Richards, Mike) and (2) prospects like these kids are what other teams have, not us.
But, like so much of the Leafs history, even when there are rare moments to celebrate, there is almost always an asterisk, a tinge of the bittersweet. For example, in 2002, when Curtis Joseph was honoured for returning from Salt Lake City with his Olympic gold medal, and then-Maple Leafs head coach Pat Quinn was likewise feted for his masterful job leading the boys wearing that other Maple Leaf to victory.
Mats Sundin never won a Stanley Cup, but he led Sweden to the 2006 Olympic gold medal. Sundin’s role in that victory is the most notable international performance by a Leaf since Darryl Sittler’s 1976 Canada Cup–winning goal.
Courtesy of Getty Images.
Joseph had been given the starter’s job in Salt Lake — a questionable move given the small matter of Martin Brodeur’s multiple Stanley Cup victories in New Jersey and the fact he had beaten Joseph the previous two springs in head-to-head playoff battles. Giving his netminder in Toronto the nod over a player as accomplished as Brodeur showed remarkable loyalty by Quinn. One problem: Cujo got funnelled almost from the moment the puck was dropped in the first game versus Sweden. The Swedes, chock full of their so-called golden generation, all in their prime in 2002, shook off an early allowed goal and made Canada look like, well, sorry Swedish hockey fans, Belarus.
The images of Sundin running roughshod over a Canadian team coached by Quinn and with Joseph in goal was about as surreal as hockey played in June at the ACC. Joseph, Quinn, and Sundin were the three key cogs in what was one of the best post-1967 Maple Leafs teams, and now they were opposing one another, with the Swedish captain helping turn Quinn’s exterior so red that the big Irishman appeared as if he was about to explode.
Curtis Joseph rarely became unhinged in Toronto, but he was also never comfortable in Team Canada’s net during the 2002 Olympics and lost the starting job. His performance likely hastened his exit from the Leafs.
Courtesy of Graig Abel.
It all worked out, of course. Canada found its stride a few days later, Sweden fell to the aforementioned Belarus, and Quinn eventually led the team to an extremely memorable gold medal win over the U.S. with Cujo firmly stuck to the bench and Brodeur between the pipes.
Back in Toronto, both men went to collect their congratulations, and the awkward moment at centre ice had the feeling of father and son running into each other in the coat check of a strip joint.
It wasn’t Quinn’s fault. He gave his guy a chance and he failed to do anything with it. When Brodeur was given his long-overdue opportunity, he ran with it and helped the country win its first men’s hockey gold in fifty years. Joseph? Though his character was never in question — the man has never lost his humble appeal — it was plainly obvious that if he could have kept his mask on that night, he would have.
In the end, the Leafs dispatched Carolina in the game following the ceremony — ironic, because it was precisely the same Hurricanes who defeated the Leafs in six games in the Eastern Conference final later that spring. Joseph played well both during the first