Like flu season, it begins every autumn. The fevered promise of the season to come. The Leafs signed a big name free agent. They drafted a wizard, a sure bet future Hall of Famer. This will make all the difference. The pieces are all there. This is the year the Leafs go all the way. The year they break the curse. I am in my mid-40s and the closest I saw them come was in 1993, and that was only the conference final. They have not made it past the first round of the playoffs since 2004. In TWENTY YEARS they have been unable to make it out of the first round of the playoffs. Many of their current fans were not even born the last time they made it out of the first round. All they have ever seen is if and when the Leafs make it to the playoffs they get booted in the first round without fail. The Leafs are championship choke artists. Or are they?
I have a hypothesis as to why it looks like the Leafs, as well as the Blue Jays LOOK like they are failing to meet expectations when maybe, just maybe, they are actually achieving success commensurate with their talent level, and Toronto fans simply cannot come to terms with it.
The other day on the radio two DJs were discussing how it could EASILY have been the Toronto Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup Final playing the Edmonton Oilers. Because the Boston Bruins NEARLY beat Florida, and Toronto NEARLY beat Boston. “A couple of lucky bounces and it’s a whole different playoffs”.
I share this with you not to ridicule the people who made these statements, but to give an example of the delusion under which Toronto sports fans operate. “If only the puck had slid a little more this way, or that skate had not been offside, we would have won!” or “if only that ball had been one metre to the left it would have been a grand slam instead of a foul and then we would have won the World Series.” If only. This implies that the Toronto teams are good enough to win it all and they are with Swiss-watch regularity the unluckiest teams in the history of their respective sports. This is quite impossible. I have another option for you. The Leafs and the Jays are not nearly as good as Toronto fans, or ownership groups think, and it is a two-headed hydra that is to blame; their own lack of critical thinking, and the multi-million dollar sports media empires that operate more as propaganda machines than sports focused journalism.
Would you like an example? I know it is an older example, but it left an impression on me because it was the first time I felt I had been conned by the sports propaganda machine. Sometime in the mid-2000s I was at a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game with some friends and I remember very clearly when our big star Vernon Wells came up to bat for the first time, because I could not believe his batting average. He had the best average on the team…and he was batting .229. Two twenty nine, but if you listened to the way the blowhards on TSN pumped his tires, you would believe he was the next Tony Gwynn*. You would swear he had been batting .300+ since little league and had never batted anything lower than .300 in his entire life. At the time it struck me as odd that such a big deal was being made about a guy batting such pedestrian numbers, but I was young and still idealistic.
How does this vicious cycle of fan delusion work? Imagine the Leafs draft a left winger with potential. We will call him Steve. In an interview after the draft, someone from the Leafs front office says “we are happy we got Steve”. And the media machine screams “you hear that, the brass think Steve is the future!” Steve plays well in the preseason and unlike most of the other rookies who get sent down to the Marlies to develop, Steve is brought up to the big club to start the season. Immediately the propaganda machine hits second gear: “Steve made the big club his rookie year, that’s a big deal, a lot will be expected of him” drone the retired players turned talking heads on one of the seemingly endless supply hockey talk radio shows, television segments, and podcasts. Eventually, because there is only so much to people can say about a singular topic, the talking heads will begin to stretch truths and by way of volume of discussion make Steve into a much bigger deal than he should be, and/or would be in nearly any other big hockey market.
The fans hear this and in the fan chat rooms, Reddit threads, and on Twitter, Steve’s potential gets lifted to new heights. “He’s the new Bobby Hull!” The season begins and Steve, even under the immense pressure, performs well. He has a good season, not a great season. But the Leafs faithful (and the media who dine out on the stupidity of the faithful) do not pay attention to such trivial details. TSN, Sportsnet, and the various sports radio shows and hockey podcasts will cherry pick some random nonsense analytics and make him a hero. “Steve had the best +/- of anyone born on a Wednesday who averaged exactly 14:37 of ice time!” they will declare with great pride. “Steve had more second period assists against Easter Conference teams than any rookie ever born in Hamilton, but raised in Medicine Hat!” they will gasp, incredulous at this “fact”. “No rookie who has size 12 feet and is 1/58th Ugandan on his father’s side has ever scored two goals in the same game on the third Tuesday of month with 30 days in it!” the hockey media will proclaim breathlessly. And the fans, desperate for good news and without any critical thinking abilities to speak of will scream from the rooftops “Our Steve is the best Steve since Yzerman!” and they will begin planning the parade. Steve will not win rookie of the year because if you remember, Steve had a GOOD year, not a great year. Steve will have a good second year, but there will be grumblings from the fans because he got three fewer goals in his second year than in his rookie campaign. The talking heads will declare him a bust and demand he be traded to Phoenix (hockey purgatory) for some Timmies gift cards, three buckets of new practice pucks, and Gatorade, flavours to be named later.
But Steve has a better third season. He finds his groove and scores five more goals in this third season and as many more assists. “Here he is, this is what the Leafs were looking for!” the talking heads scream into the screen. The fans start foaming at the mouth calling for Leafs management to sign Steve to an extension, something big to make sure they retain his services and he does not become a free agent. “The Leafs cannot afford to lose Steve!” insist the talking heads. The frenzy has been sufficiently whipped up, Leafs management get caught up in it and do exactly that. They pay Steve significantly more than he would be worth on the open market for fear they might lose their young “star”. But Steve is not in reality a star. He is simply a good player with a metric ton of marketing behind him. Now you have a GOOD player making SUPERSTAR money. Do that three more times and you get the current Leafs roster. Four good to very good players making so much money the team cannot afford to fill out their roster with the appropriate talent to challenge for a Stanley Cup.
The talking heads make a mountain out of a molehill, the fans then take that mountain and make it so big it touches the clouds, and then Leafs front office drinks the Kool-Aid, turns around and thinks to itself, “holy shit, we have an honest to god mountain, we should sign it for a max deal”, and no one can see the molehill for what it is; competence, but not excellence.
In the end it comes down to marketing. Leafs fans are repeatedly told that the team is a championship contender by the talking heads on TSN and its like. It is an easy sell because they desperately want it to be true. They see the ludicrous volume of Leafs talk and assume that if the hockey media is spending that much time talking about the Leafs, they MUST be on the verge of greatness. But they are not. And they will not be until Leafs brass stop believing their own hype. It skews their vision and makes them play good players superstar money, thus undermining the rest of the team.
Grammaticus Rex 
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