The Next Ones

by Michael Traikos

  “You could tell that he was going to turn the franchise around,” said Harper. “I think at the time it wasn’t a great team or fanbase and didn’t have a great reputation for players to go there and stuff. And now you see that Erie’s one of the better places to play in the league. I think he definitely changed the whole culture. Connor definitely got us into sellouts every night. We became a hockey hotbed.”

  * * *

  On a hot afternoon in August, Bob Catalde made the same drive from Erie that Sherry Bassin had made several years earlier. Once again, someone was looking for McDavid. And once again, he was nowhere to be found. Except this time, Catalde knew where to look. “As soon as I pull up to his driveway, what’s he doing? He’s in his garage firing 150 or 200 pucks. We’re supposed to play golf and we’re going to be late for our tee time. But he said he wasn’t going to leave until he fired all these pucks. This kid is not only gifted, but he works hard too. He doesn’t stop.”

  Mitch Marner

  Mitch Marner plays for the Maple Leafs at the 2015 NHL Rookie Tournament. The Canadian Press/Dave Chidley

  Toronto Maple Leafs

  » № 16 «

  Position

  Centre

  Shoots

  Right

  Height

  6′0″

  Weight

  175 lb

  Born

  May 5, 1997

  Birthplace

  Markham, ON, CAN

  Draft

  2015 TOR, 1st rd, 4th pk (4th overall)

  Mitch Marner

  Normally, Bonnie Marner has just one tea before the first intermission. One large tea from Tim Hortons that she purchases right before the start of the game and that she then spends the first period sipping, timing her bathroom break with an official break in the action. As the unofficial videographer of the Marner clan, she never dared to miss even a second of her youngest son’s hockey games. But then Mitch Marner made it to the NHL and everything changed.

  To be fair, it wasn’t Bonnie’s fault. On the home opener of the 2016–17 season, the Toronto Maple Leafs were honouring their one-hundredth anniversary with a pre-game celebration that seemed to go on forever. By the time the puck finally dropped, Bonnie was already on her second cup. Understandably, nature called much earlier than usual. “I was dying,” said Bonnie. “My teeth were floating in the back of my mouth.”

  Finally, her husband told her to just go. She was safe, said Paul Marner. The Leafs had just taken a penalty and Mitch wasn’t on the penalty kill unit. If Bonnie hurried, she probably wasn’t going to miss a thing. And then, as she was drying her hands, she heard it: first came the roar of the crowd, followed by the sound of the goal horn as Marner wristed a shot past Boston Bruins goalie Anton Khudobin at 12:52. On the Sportsnet TV broadcast, the camera panned to Paul as play-by-play announcer Jim Hughson said, “Mom and Dad, Paul and Bonnie, celebrate the first National Hockey League goal for Mitchell Marner.”

  Except Paul was celebrating by himself. Bonnie, meanwhile, was cursing her bad luck. “In the bathroom they play the game and they mentioned number 16 and I thought, ‘Bloody hell!’ I quickly ran out of the bathroom and I didn’t know where I was. I just had to get out to the ice surface,” remembered Bonnie. “I celebrated with the ladies who help you find your seat.

  “I said, ‘What happened?’ She said the rookie just got his first goal. It was a beauty. You missed a good one.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m his mom’ and she didn’t believe me. She was really nice. She said, ‘Oh, you’re not old enough to be his mom.’” It was a familiar comment. If Bonnie Marner didn’t look like she could be the mother of a nineteen-year-old, then her nineteen-year-old, who has never had to buy a razor and used to eat peanut butter right out of the jar in hopes of packing on weight, didn’t look like he was old enough to be in the NHL. Of course, looks can be deceiving.

  Marner has always been one of the best and one of the most talented players on any team he’s played for. At the age of four, he was dominating against six-year-olds. He won a Junior A championship against twenty-year-olds when he was fifteen and finished second in OHL scoring when he was seventeen. And yet few players have spent their careers being as second-guessed as Marner.

  Oh sure, critics would say, he might be able to score goals and put up points at this level. But there’s no way he’ll be able to do it at the next level. He’s far too small, far too frail. And then Marner would get to the next level and prove everyone wrong. But as soon as it came time for him to jump up to another level, those same questions would persist. “A lot of guys didn’t think what he was doing was transferable to the next level,” said Leafs scout Lindsay Hofford, who has known Marner since he was seven years old. “I even talked to NHL guys and they said he’d be a great junior player but he wouldn’t be an NHL player. But they said the same thing about him at the minor hockey level when he was getting drafted to the OHL.”

  It was not until his rookie season with the Leafs that Marner put all those questions to rest. Marner might have been the only Toronto player who didn’t have to worry about GM Lou Lamoriello’s ban on facial hair, but he hardly played like a nineteen-year-old kid. In 77 games he tied for third among rookies in scoring with 19 goals and 61 points and was named to the league’s All-Rookie Team. Along with Matthews and Nylander, he was one of the main reasons why Toronto went from finishing with the worst record in 2015–16 to qualifying for the playoffs.

  If you had doubts about Marner’s size, you didn’t anymore. “I heard it all my life growing up,” Marner, who led the Leafs with 69 points in 2017–18, said of the question marks surrounding his size. “It definitely got annoying. That talk still hasn’t gone away yet, but I think one day it will.”

  * * *

  He always wanted to demonstrate. He wanted to be first. He’d put his arm up. I started doing private lessons with him and his brother. Mitch was just so advanced. His brother would try to keep up with him and he couldn’t; he would only get the first two parts of the drill, where Mitch would get six or seven parts of the drill no problem from a very young age. And his brother is four years older. [Mitch’s] vision and his mind are top of the charts of anyone in the NHL. — Rob Desveaux, director and head instructor, 3 Zones Hockey

  * * *

  The first time someone unfairly judged Mitchell Marner because of his size was when Paul Marner was trying to find someone to coach his youngest son. Paul Marner always knew Mitch was special. At age two, Mitch could already perform forward and backward crossovers. He could raise the puck well over the net. By the time he started playing organized hockey in Clarington, Ontario, he was competing in a full-contact league against kids who were as much as two years older. CityTV in Toronto had even featured him as an Athlete of the Week, with a reporter asking if the blond-haired tyke thought he could score a goal on then–Maple Leafs goalie Curtis Joseph. Without hesitation, Mitch looked at the camera and nodded.

  Still, Rob Desveaux wasn’t sold. When he got a call from Paul Marner asking to train Mitch at 3 Zones Hockey in Ajax, Ontario, Desveaux practically hung up the phone. “I’m not a babysitter,” he said. Mitch was four years old then. And although he wasn’t exactly a baby, he was still four or more years younger than the youngest kids at Desveaux’s hockey school. But Paul Marner persisted. He’d been certain Desveaux was the right person to coach his son ever since he’d seen a young Tyler Seguin dominate against older competition in a local tournament. “I think the game ended up 11–1 and Tyler had nine points,” Paul Marner said of Seguin, the second overall pick in 2010. “And he was playing a year up. I just watched him and went, ‘Wow.’”

  Seguin was seven years old when he first started working with Desveaux, but Paul Marner did not want to wait that long. For months, he kept bugging Desveaux to take on Mitch. For months, Desveaux kept telling him to wait until Mitch was older and bigger. “I don’t take kids that age, because you get a lot of parents who think their kids are superstars,” said Desveaux. “He kept buggi
ng me to take his kid and after a couple of months I finally said, ‘Okay, bring him.’”

  There was, however, one small condition. If little Mitch couldn’t hold his own—if he couldn’t keep up or if he wasn’t mature enough to follow instruction—Desveaux warned Paul that his son would pay for it. “He said, ‘Bring Mitch to my school on Monday night and if he embarrasses me, I’ll have thirty-five kids on the ice and I’m going to drag you and him to centre ice and you’ll have to walk him off the ice in front of all the parents and kids,’” said Paul Marner. “So he goes, ‘Do you still want to do it?’”

  Paul agreed, even though Mitch had no idea what was taking place. “It’s funny, because I drive to the rink and Mitch used to nap on the way because he’s a baby,” said Paul Marner. “I mean, he’s four years old. Anyway, I take him there and carry him into the rink because he’s still asleep and get him dressed and walk over to the boards.”

  Said Desveaux: “I was on the ice and somebody said there’s a guy here to talk to you. So I see Paul and I say, ‘Where’s your kid?’ And he reached down and pulled him up. He was so small that I didn’t even see him over the boards.”

  “Rob literally rolled his eyes,” said Paul.

  The eye-rolling ceased as soon as Mitch started skating. As promised, he didn’t embarrass anyone. In the first drill, Desveaux asked the group of kids, who were mostly seven- and eight-year-olds, to perform a power turn around a pylon on their forehand side. Then he told them to switch it up and do it on their backhand side. About half of them messed it up and did it on the wrong side. Not Mitch. He was a natural. Paul added another pylon and told the kids to perform figure eights. Mitch executed the drill as though he had been doing it for years.

  Desveaux looked over to Paul, who was still standing by the side of the boards, grinning. “He’s in,” said Desveaux. “I’ll work with him anytime.”

  Others have needed more convincing. Sitting at the kitchen table in his home in Vaughan, Paul Marner opened up a black IBM laptop. “I’m just going to show you something,” he said, typing a few words into YouTube. “I made this for him on his draft night.” On the screen popped up a highlight package of Mitch, beginning from the time when he was four years old until he was eighteen.

  There’s a mite-sized Mitch playing against McDavid. And one of him against Michael Dal Colle and another against Robby Fabbri. There’s the CityTV clip of when he was Athlete of the Week, one of Mitch evading a bodycheck and one of him celebrating a goal as if it was scored in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup. “That’s him going for a hit,” said Paul Marner, laughing. “That used to be a big part of his game.”

  Mitch Marner plays for the Vaughan Kings. Photo courtesy of the Marner family

  Most of the footage is from Bonnie Marner, his mom, who recorded nearly every second of Mitch’s hockey career. Part of the reason she did it was because Mitch wanted to watch his many goals—and dissect his play—immediately after the family came home from a game. The other reason was Paul and Bonnie got tired of all the negative comments the other parents were saying about their youngest son: how he was a puck hog who never passed, how he was too small to ever amount to anything, how they were wasting their time.

  “After that, they never wanted to come near me,” Bonnie Marner said of filming the other parents. “They would say, ‘Is that on?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, I’m catching every word you say.’ It would get people so mad.”

  Paul Marner hadn’t taken to hockey like his youngest son. He’d played mostly house league hockey until he was twelve or thirteen years old, and then switched over to competitive sailing because that was what his father was into. Paul sailed everywhere from Florida and Syracuse to California and Texas. “When you’re out on ten- or sixteen-foot waves on a sixteen-foot boat and it’s blowing twenty to twenty-five knots, it’s very physical,” said Paul. “That’s why I did pretty well in races. I loved what we call heavy water and heavy wind, because I was young. The harder it blew and the bigger the waves, the more fun I had.”

  Paul Marner still cuts a solid physique. His wife Bonnie is more lithe. At 5-foot-9, she’s the one who then-Leafs interim GM Mark Hunter joked “was a good size, so you would think [Mitch would] grow.” But for years and years, Paul and Bonnie waited for Mitch to hit a growth spurt that never came. The discrepancy in size between Mitch and the other players was usually compounded by the fact that he almost always played a year up.

  “When people make comments about his size, even now, I find it hilarious because he’s about six feet now and about 170,” said Paul Marner. “This is probably the least disadvantaged he’s been his entire life to his peers. At the end of minor midget, he was 5-foot-6 and 110 pounds and when he showed up at his first OHL camp he was 5-foot-7 and 125 pounds. And everybody said, ‘He’ll never play.’”

  The thing is, Marner always played. He always competed. His parents talk about how Mitch used to watch entire hockey games, his eyes glued to the TV, when he was ten months old. They talk about how Mitch used to not only watch games as a four-year-old, but would also point out when a player made the wrong pass. He picked up sports with ease. When he was two, he could run at full speed and kick a soccer ball with both feet.

  Mitch Marner shoots on net while playing for the Vaughan Kings. Photo courtesy of the Marner family

  “He picked up a lacrosse stick for the first time at five and I’m throwing him a ball and he’s catching it and throwing it back to me like he’d done it before,” said Paul Marner. “At the time, Clarington was getting its first rep lacrosse team. The first year they had an A team, Mitch made the team as an under-ager and he was the only under-ager on the team.”

  As talented as Marner was at lacrosse, his real passion was hockey. He idolized Mats Sundin. He talked about playing in the NHL. It was all he wanted. “He’d be in the kitchen with the mini-stick taking shots on my mom as she was cooking,” said Mitch’s brother Chris. “Taking shots between her legs, acting like the oven was the goalie net.” As with lacrosse, Mitch was not only good enough to play up a year, but two years. When he was six years old, he was playing against eight-year-olds. “And it was full contact back then,” said Chris. “It’s not like today.”

  Desveaux helped with that too. Since Marner was smaller than everyone else, Desveaux aimed to make him faster, quicker and more agile. “Slippery” was the word Desveaux used. “Rob helped me with that,” said Marner. “He taught me skills that would help me against taller guys, and that would get me out of situations that could go wrong.”

  Marner learned the “spread-eagle,” a skating technique where you open your legs and point one foot north and the other south, allowing you to quickly change directions to avoid an oncoming check. “When a guy is checking you, he doesn’t know if you are going to go left or right,” said Desveaux.

  He drilled Marner on how to hold his stick in a way that gave him added balance, sort of like a walking stick. “You have to use your stick to your advantage. Most guys in the NHL don’t do that. For most, it’s a detriment. It causes balance problems. I watch guys with their stick and they’re falling down because of it.”

  Marner and Desveaux did some very odd drills. For one, Desveaux would grab a gymnastics-style springboard and place it near the hash marks. Marner would skate full speed and jump off it, spinning 360 degrees in the air, and land on one foot. Desveaux would sometimes stand in the landing area, creating an obstacle for Marner to get around. Or he would pass a puck when Marner was airborne and force him to quickly grab it and get a shot on net.

  “With Mitch being so light and so agile, we played to his strengths,” said Desveaux. “You have to be able to get away from people. When you’ve got a player like him, you’ve got to work on things that are going to make him the best, because he’s probably never going to be two hundred pounds. All that kind of nimble stuff that he could do because he was lighter and smaller, the big guys couldn’t do it because it was too hard.”

  Desveaux also taught Marner to take a h
it. Or rather, he taught him how to avoid getting hit. And he did it the hard way. By hitting him. “I’d take him into the corner and I’d hammer him and knock him on his ass,” said Desveaux, laughing. “I’m 6-foot-1 and 225 pounds, so it wasn’t easy for him. I used my body, but I also used checking pads, which are these soft pads that I have. And his dad would be right in the corner and I’d be laying [Mitch] out big time. He just learned to be agile. I just taught him to spin away from me and keep away from me. That’s what he did. Eventually I couldn’t get near him.”

  No one could. At least, not legally. “Twice in London he got hurt,” said Paul Marner. “One guy got an eight-game suspension and one guy got a ten-game suspension. The first guy cross-checked him from behind and he hit the boards and he didn’t have the puck and wasn’t even expecting it. The second one was a blindside as he rounded the net and he didn’t have the puck and the guy cross-checked him in the side of the neck.”

  “There were a lot of teams that tried to get under his skin or try a cheap shot,” said former teammate Liam Dunda. “He’s a tough guy. He might not look like it, but he can stand up for himself.”

  * * *

  The second time someone unfairly judged Marner because of his size was when he was seven years old. Marner had been invited to join a summer all-star team that Lindsay Hofford was putting together. But something went wrong. The coach of the team had taken one look at Marner, who was a year younger than the other kids and significantly smaller, and cut him.