Kin
New member
Apologies but this will be a very lengthy post...
I've been a Maple Leafs fan for about 22 years or so. I can't pinpoint exactly when I became a Maple Leafs fan. I'd gone to games at the Gardens since I was about 5 or so but early on I remember liking the Whalers or Penguins mainly. I'd guess that the fandom really took root when the Leafs, tragically bad for most of that time, got good in the 92-93 season.
About 15 or so years ago I think I probably reached a point where the information was available enough and my brain developed enough to start thinking critically about why the Maple Leafs didn't seem to be as good as the teams that won the Stanley Cup and, as a fan of the Leafs, began thinking about ways for them to remedy that.
A simple solution presented itself. Something that I thought was indisputably true. In order for the Leafs, or any team, to get good enough to win the Stanley Cup, they first had to go through a stretch where they were very bad. This would give them the best possible chance to draft the sort of players that teams needed to win. Combined with smart management, that losing would be the painful and necessary first step on the road to building a powerhouse.
This, I would argue(here primarily) was a path the Leafs should take intentionally. They should try to be bad in order to avail themselves of the best position in the reverse-order draft.
After many years of saying this, after untold thousands of words in posts like this one and all sorts of research to back up this indisputably true point it seems as though finally, finally, the team I've cheered for for so long is going to do down this prescribed path. No more "re-tooling". No more "building while competing". No more big contracts to bad free agents in a desperate attempt at competency. Finally an honest rebuild.
So I should be happy. I should be genuinely excited that the Leafs are finally going to do what I really do feel is necessary for them ever to win a Stanley Cup in my lifetime. This is basically my Leafs fan Christmas. But, on the eve of a season where the Leafs seem more or less designed to be as bad as possible, there is something I feel that needs to be said because it, like my belief in their need to be bad, is just as true:
This is all unforgivably stupid.
It's ethically wrong. It's morally dubious. It's contrary to what "Sport" is supposed to be about. This should be taken as an insult, an affront, to any thinking sports fan. A slap in the face to anyone who follows these games because, deep down, they love competition. Because they want to see effort and skill rewarded when it's the best.
Incompetence shouldn't be rewarded. Smart people, people who aren't incompetent, shouldn't be forced to approximate the methods of the incompetent because to do so yields rewards. Championships should not be the result of sustained losing. We can parse what "throwing" a game or a season means, sure, but if you are engaged in a competition, you should not try to lose whether by active forfeit or design. If there is incentive for you to do so, then that incentive should not exist.
The Toronto Maple Leafs, I'm pretty confident in saying, are being run by smart people. The Edmonton Oilers, I'm equally confident in saying, have in recent years been run by people who are, comparatively speaking, incompetent. Despite this, the Edmonton Oilers go into this season with a team that looks to have every possibility of being very exciting to watch and might very well be a good team very quickly. The Maple Leafs, realistically, have a long road ahead of them in the hopes that they can assemble the sort of talent that Edmonton has.
But what does the fact that Edmonton has failed their way into that talent say? What does it mean if they win a championship with those players? What bragging rights would any Edmonton supporter have? "Haha, our team was so poorly run that we had 4 1st overall picks!".
If the Maple Leafs do what the vast majority of us want them to do, be very bad this year and get lucky through the random drawing of chance and draft someone like Auston Matthews, that might be the result of design, sure, but it won't be an accomplishment in any real sense of the word. It's gaming a stupid, poorly designed system that sublimates honest, reasonable competition for the business interests of people who own hockey teams. We're asking these people to feign incompetence because that's the surest path to the top.
Reading these boards the way I do, I know people know that. I'm pretty sure it's why some people are, quite frankly, not being very realistic when they set a time-frame for how long this process will go. They don't want this to last five years. The idea that the next five years will be bad, intentionally bad, strikes at the heart of what makes them fans of watching athletic competitions. Some are trying to mitigate it by getting excited about watching AHL or OHL games just in the hopes that what they see there will be a harbinger of success for the team they actually care about.
I understand these impulses. Five years is a long time. The thought of it, what we're probably about to all watch, has really dampened my enthusiasm for this sport. I'm never going to stop being obsessive about this team, I'm too far gone for that, but I can't help but feel more than a little worn down by it despite whatever rewards it may bring. I hope that if it goes well I'll find some sort of way to look at it as anything other than the fortunate result of cynically exploiting a broken, counter-intuitive system but who knows? I'll be almost 40 by then probably.
All throughout both lockouts I argued, at length, that fans of teams like the Maple Leafs deserved to be rewarded for their fandom. That it didn't make sense to ask the fans of this team to watch a bad product for the sake of fans in Arizona or Ottawa or whoever. If the Maple Leafs fanbase were rational consumers in any other instance and were told that the product we wanted to buy was intentionally going to be bad so as to let other people buy the product we wanted...well, I don't think we'd be consumers of that product.
But that didn't win out. Parity was the name of the game. Talent distribution. Competitive balance.
So here we are. About to embark on an 82 game schedule where the team we cheer for isn't designed to win, we don't want it to win and we're all supposed to pretend that this is in any way an honest reflection of why any of us became fans in the first place. There's a word I want to use for that but can't so I'll just say that this whole enterprise resembles the leavings of male cows.
Go Leafs Go.
I've been a Maple Leafs fan for about 22 years or so. I can't pinpoint exactly when I became a Maple Leafs fan. I'd gone to games at the Gardens since I was about 5 or so but early on I remember liking the Whalers or Penguins mainly. I'd guess that the fandom really took root when the Leafs, tragically bad for most of that time, got good in the 92-93 season.
About 15 or so years ago I think I probably reached a point where the information was available enough and my brain developed enough to start thinking critically about why the Maple Leafs didn't seem to be as good as the teams that won the Stanley Cup and, as a fan of the Leafs, began thinking about ways for them to remedy that.
A simple solution presented itself. Something that I thought was indisputably true. In order for the Leafs, or any team, to get good enough to win the Stanley Cup, they first had to go through a stretch where they were very bad. This would give them the best possible chance to draft the sort of players that teams needed to win. Combined with smart management, that losing would be the painful and necessary first step on the road to building a powerhouse.
This, I would argue(here primarily) was a path the Leafs should take intentionally. They should try to be bad in order to avail themselves of the best position in the reverse-order draft.
After many years of saying this, after untold thousands of words in posts like this one and all sorts of research to back up this indisputably true point it seems as though finally, finally, the team I've cheered for for so long is going to do down this prescribed path. No more "re-tooling". No more "building while competing". No more big contracts to bad free agents in a desperate attempt at competency. Finally an honest rebuild.
So I should be happy. I should be genuinely excited that the Leafs are finally going to do what I really do feel is necessary for them ever to win a Stanley Cup in my lifetime. This is basically my Leafs fan Christmas. But, on the eve of a season where the Leafs seem more or less designed to be as bad as possible, there is something I feel that needs to be said because it, like my belief in their need to be bad, is just as true:
This is all unforgivably stupid.
It's ethically wrong. It's morally dubious. It's contrary to what "Sport" is supposed to be about. This should be taken as an insult, an affront, to any thinking sports fan. A slap in the face to anyone who follows these games because, deep down, they love competition. Because they want to see effort and skill rewarded when it's the best.
Incompetence shouldn't be rewarded. Smart people, people who aren't incompetent, shouldn't be forced to approximate the methods of the incompetent because to do so yields rewards. Championships should not be the result of sustained losing. We can parse what "throwing" a game or a season means, sure, but if you are engaged in a competition, you should not try to lose whether by active forfeit or design. If there is incentive for you to do so, then that incentive should not exist.
The Toronto Maple Leafs, I'm pretty confident in saying, are being run by smart people. The Edmonton Oilers, I'm equally confident in saying, have in recent years been run by people who are, comparatively speaking, incompetent. Despite this, the Edmonton Oilers go into this season with a team that looks to have every possibility of being very exciting to watch and might very well be a good team very quickly. The Maple Leafs, realistically, have a long road ahead of them in the hopes that they can assemble the sort of talent that Edmonton has.
But what does the fact that Edmonton has failed their way into that talent say? What does it mean if they win a championship with those players? What bragging rights would any Edmonton supporter have? "Haha, our team was so poorly run that we had 4 1st overall picks!".
If the Maple Leafs do what the vast majority of us want them to do, be very bad this year and get lucky through the random drawing of chance and draft someone like Auston Matthews, that might be the result of design, sure, but it won't be an accomplishment in any real sense of the word. It's gaming a stupid, poorly designed system that sublimates honest, reasonable competition for the business interests of people who own hockey teams. We're asking these people to feign incompetence because that's the surest path to the top.
Reading these boards the way I do, I know people know that. I'm pretty sure it's why some people are, quite frankly, not being very realistic when they set a time-frame for how long this process will go. They don't want this to last five years. The idea that the next five years will be bad, intentionally bad, strikes at the heart of what makes them fans of watching athletic competitions. Some are trying to mitigate it by getting excited about watching AHL or OHL games just in the hopes that what they see there will be a harbinger of success for the team they actually care about.
I understand these impulses. Five years is a long time. The thought of it, what we're probably about to all watch, has really dampened my enthusiasm for this sport. I'm never going to stop being obsessive about this team, I'm too far gone for that, but I can't help but feel more than a little worn down by it despite whatever rewards it may bring. I hope that if it goes well I'll find some sort of way to look at it as anything other than the fortunate result of cynically exploiting a broken, counter-intuitive system but who knows? I'll be almost 40 by then probably.
All throughout both lockouts I argued, at length, that fans of teams like the Maple Leafs deserved to be rewarded for their fandom. That it didn't make sense to ask the fans of this team to watch a bad product for the sake of fans in Arizona or Ottawa or whoever. If the Maple Leafs fanbase were rational consumers in any other instance and were told that the product we wanted to buy was intentionally going to be bad so as to let other people buy the product we wanted...well, I don't think we'd be consumers of that product.
But that didn't win out. Parity was the name of the game. Talent distribution. Competitive balance.
So here we are. About to embark on an 82 game schedule where the team we cheer for isn't designed to win, we don't want it to win and we're all supposed to pretend that this is in any way an honest reflection of why any of us became fans in the first place. There's a word I want to use for that but can't so I'll just say that this whole enterprise resembles the leavings of male cows.
Go Leafs Go.
