The Toronto Maple Leafs seem to have a split personality. On some days, they are the consummate professional Dr. Jekyll, an upstanding citizen in the hockey community, a team that shuts down opposing forwards with their strength and grinds out goals with a combination of talent and tenacity. On other days, they are the evil Mr. Hyde, a person free of conscience, seeming to not care about their performance or the consequences of their actions. They are careless with their passes and genuinely disinterested in puck possession.
On Tuesday night against the Carolina Hurricanes, the Leafs were Dr. Jekyll, forcing the play, dictating the flow, and putting forth their best effort, and ultimately came up a little short. The experiment didn’t generate the result they had wanted, but the science was sound, the variables controlled. The performance was worthy of the respect that a person such as a Dr. Jekyll commands.
Last night, against the Columbus Blue Jackets, Dr. Jekyll once again became Mr. Hyde, as the successful experimentation in the first period produced the game-changing formula, and the Leafs play got ugly. They couldn’t connect on passes, they stopped skating and were often caught out of position and back against their heels. They committed giveaway after giveaway, icing after icing, turnover after turnover.
And just like in the famed Robert Louis Stevenson novel, where Dr. Jekyll finds that he is becoming Mr. Hyde involuntarily in his sleep, so too are the Maple Leafs. They fall asleep, and the result on the ice is typically a Mr. Hyde performance. When Dr. Jekyll discovers that this is happening, he vows to try more adamantly to fight the transformations, and does so through philanthropy, redeeming himself by being a model citizen. This keeps the evil Mr. Hyde at bay for some time.
While the Leafs at this point may be beyond any kind of playoff redemption, there is still hope that they too can follow in the good Dr.’s footsteps and redeem themselves by being a model hockey team. They are, however, on a dangerous path, the same path that Dr. Jekyll set out upon, one that ends with him losing the ability to stop the transformations and becoming Mr. Hyde permanently.
With losses in 5 of their last 6, and questionable effort and cohesiveness for most of those games, the Leafs are on the precipice of becoming their own Mr. Hyde permanently; the culture of losing, a culture Burke has tried so hard to eliminate from the locker room, is slowly creeping back in, re-infecting the team with the dreaded Blue and White disease. Just as Dr. Jekyll has to make stronger and stronger potions to prevent Mr. Hyde from re-appearing, so to must the Leafs take stronger measures to counter Blue and White disease.
It is a difficult situation to be in, as making examples out of players or holding them accountable for their actions could diminish their trade value, and with the impending deadline it is important to have your movable assets shown in a positive light. Not many teams are willing to trade for healthy scratches these days. In cases like this, the solution then becomes holding the entire team accountable, without mentioning individual players, or rewarding positive performances with increased ice time or responsibility.
With less than 2 months remaining until the NHL’s February 28th trade deadline, action must be taken to prevent this transformation from becoming permanent. In the novel, Dr. Jekyll runs out of ingredients to make the potion that keeps him from turning into Mr. Hyde. Burke is now tasked with finding these ingredients, and they are becoming increasingly rare in the salary cap era. Should he not, the Leafs could share the same fate, and Leafs fans could one day be finding a metaphorical note reading:
“This is the end of Dr. Jekyll. Goodbye… Good…”
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Born and raised in Northern Ontario but currently living in Toronto, Tyler wouldn't have it any other way. Home to his two favourite sports teams, Tyler revels in the day to day sports experience that is Toronto. 