From Spineless to Incompent: A History of Leafs' GMs, Part II

A History of Leafs' GMs, Part II

1989 - 1991 Floyd Smith

Floyd Smith (AKA Sleepy Floyd, Count Floyd, Trader Smith) gets his own blog entry, not so much for what he did as a GM (make a million trades and see his team hit rock bottom) but because of all the turmoil that surrounded the Leafs during his tenure.

The similarities between JFJ’s run and Floyd Smith’s are amazing – from conflict at the Board Level to an initial effort to go with youth that resulted in whole sale trades of draft picks and prospects; from a promising start to a search for a new executive to come in as a new President and GM of the Leafs to clean up the horrible mess.

Winning %: .428

Playoff Appearances: 1 for 2

Drafted: Felix Potvin, Yanic Perreault, Alexander Goodynyuk

Best Trade: Peter Zezel and Bob Rouse acquired for Al Iafrate

Worst Trade: Tom Kurvers acquired for a first round pick (Scott Niedermayer).

The Back Story

When Gord Stellick resigned in August of 1989, Harold Ballard offered the Leafs’ GM job to Frank Bonello, who was the GM of the Marlies Club that won the 1975 Memorial Cup. Ballard low-balled the salary offer to Bonello and the deal fell through. The very next morning, Ballard announced that former Leaf coach Floyd Smith was the Leafs' new GM.

Floyd Smith's team actually managed to put up a respectable record in his first year, going 38-38-4 (the Leafs first .500 season in more than a decade - since 1978-79). Toronto qualified for the post season, but were eliminated by the St. Louis Blues in five games (in the land before Internet, I remember lying on the floor of a dorm room in Ottawa doing everything I possibly could to try to maintain a static riddled, weak AM radio signal of that final Leafs' game. I can still hear the cry of "Momesso" when his slap shot from out near the redline eliminated put my beloved Toronto Maple Leafs down 3-0 in the series).

One of the most infamous bad trades in the history of the Leaf franchise went down on Smith's watch: a first round pick to New Jersey for Tom Kurvers. The deal was pulled off by Smith in the fall of 1989 when the Leafs were a mid-pack club. Neither the media, the fans or the club saw what was coming: in his second season as GM, the wheels completely fell off.

The 1990-91 season pretty much couldn’t have gone worse for the Leafs who flirted with last overall pretty much from day one. The team lost 13 of their first 16 games and Smith was ordered to revamp the roster. He would go on to make eight trades over the next nine weeks and while a few of the trades brought some pretty important talent to the club, the Leafs’ never recovered. I can remember seeing New Jersey Devil jerserys with Lindros’ 88 on the back.

The death of Harold Ballard led to a huge legal battle over the future of the franchise. Donald Giffin and Steve Stavro, the co-executors of Ballard’s estate, ended up in a protracted legal battle over the future of the Toronto Maple Leafs organization.

Giffin wanted to keep Smith on as GM and bring in one of John Ferguson Sr., Mike Nykoluk, or former Leafs GM Jim Gregory to run the hockey organization. Stavro was desperate to depose Floyd Smith and bring in a business person to oversee the Leafs; his first choice was Lyman MacInnis, who was the then-head of the Entertainment division of Labatt’s.

Ultimately, Steve Stavro won the court case, the decision allowed him to replace Giffin with a Chief Operating Officer who would turn out to be Cliff Fletcher.

The Good

The Leafs first .500 season in a decade made it seem like this team was finally on the right track.
Harold Ballard died.

A few key future Leafs acquired: Zezel, Rouse, Potvin...

The Bad

Better pull up a chair…

The Leafs started the 1989 season with three wins in their first 16 games and then started the 1990 calendar year by going winless in 10 (0-7-3).

The Leafs had actually collected a number of early draft picks most of whom were shipped out of town when Smith pulled off eight trades in November and December of 1990. In addition to the prospects, in a desperate attempt to right the ship, Smith also traded three of the four first round draft picks.

The Leafs goaltending tandem was Raycroftian. Alan Bester, who never returned to form after giving up the famous Sergio Momesso playoff goal, would find himself spending a portion of the year in the minors with the Newmarket Saints, while Peter Ing was clearly in over his head.

The Crazy

On the one-month anniversary of Smith's hiring, the ever classy Ballard told the media that he’d gladly hire a different GM if someone better came along.

With defenceman Todd Gill struggling, Brad Marsh returns to action after being a healthy scratch for two months, only to have coach Tom Watt decide the Leafs will go with a five-man defensive rotation.

With all of Smith’s wheeling and dealing, the 1990-91 Toronto Maple Leafs dressed a team record 48 players that season.

Prior to being traded, Al Iafrate went through a very messy, public divorce, a paternity suit in St. Louis and his teammate Gary Leeman began publicly dating Iafrate's ex-wife.

Smith would finally trade Tom Kurvers to Vancouver for Brian Bradley. Bradley was goaless in his first season with the Leafs, putting up 11 assists in 26 games as a Leaf. The following season, Bradley continued to struggle scoring goals, potting just 10 in 59 games. Eventually, Bradley would be traded to Tampa Bay where he threatened to break the fifty goal mark in his first year with the club and would eventually score 42 in his first go ‘round with the Lightning.

Floyd Smith thought so much of defenceman Brad Marsh (who couldn’t crack the Leafs line-up and was not protected when the Senators expansion draft occurred) that Smith planned to offer the Leafs coaching position to him.

Smith puts Cliff Fletcher’s name forward to the Board of Directors, he told the Toronto Star: "Sure I knew it would probably cost me my job, but I recommended very strongly that they hire Cliff Fletcher to run the show.”

On the patented DGB How bad was it? 100 point scale: 93 – Just like JFJ’s tenure, Floyd Smith’s Leafs qualified for the post-season in Smith’s first year and seemed to have things going their way. Board interference and an inability to stick to plan made Smith’s second year one of the most tumultuous in Leafs history. Picks and prospects were shipped out of town by the truckload; the dressing room saw some unparalleled conflicts and the starting goalie lost all confidence and ability. And once again, Cliff Fletcher was brought to town to help clean up the mess…

One more chance to get it all wrong

No matter where you set the points bar to qualify for the post-season in the East (does it really matter if it's 89 or 93 points?) the Leafs can pretty much lose no more than two, maybe three games the rest of the season if they want to make it to the post-season dance.

The way this season has gone, two losses is pretty much an average week, week-and-a-half in Leaf land.

Clearly the playoffs are a pipe dream - as they have been since the all-star break - sixteen wins in your first 43 games will do that to a team.

I don't think missing the playoffs is the worst part of this season (yeah, it stings) - what's worse is what the Leafs are doing with their prospects.

Why on earth is Tlusty playing four to six minutes a night? He got a single shift in the second period against the Devils. He's averaging five shifts a game. Is it just me? Why is this kid even in the NHL?

I know he's just an injury fill-in, but Jeremy Williams had just one shift in the second and a single shift in the third.

Stalman got a more respectable 14:35 of ice time.

Is this any way to develop and evaluate talent?

Hopefully, someone near and dear to the coaching and player development staff will find a calculator and do the post-season math for them. Once the Leafs are officially-officially eliminated from the playoffs, I hope Maurice just lets the kids play.

The rest of the team couldn't carry the mail this year, the playoffs aren't going to happen, clearly it's time to give the kids plenty of ice time to see what they're capable of.

The Devil's Advocate

One of the things that I hope this blog offers is an alternative to what you can get in the papers, on sports radio and from the TSN's and Sportsnets of this world.

I'd like to think of it as a really engaging conversation among people who love hockey. And like any good conversation it will have funny parts, controversial bits, occassional lulls (well maybe more than the occassinal one) and even disagreements. I'd also like to think that this space moves above and beyond the two-dimensional qualities and false dichotomies that marr so much sports coverage and so many exchanges (yeah, I know the Leafs suck, thanks for posting).

With that in mind, I really wanted to know what a fan of the Devils made of the Kaberle hit (as Winnie the Pooh says to Tigger in one of my daughter's books, "Good manners are mostly about looking at things from someone else's point of view.") so I fired an email to Tom at The Out Route (he and I have exchanged music tips over at Glorious Noise for years) and asked him if he wanted to send a paragraph or two my way.

He did, and here it is:

OK, let’s get this out of the way: I’m a Devils fan. I’m the enemy.

But take pause, Leafs fans, before you sling your iBarbs into my skin. I know we haven’t been at harmony over the recent years. We dislike you because you remind us a little too much of the Rangers, with your tradition, free-spirited spending, and blue jerseys. You dislike us because we win Stanley Cups and you don’t. Kidding, kidding. I just had to get that one out of the way.

I know that tensions are high after Tomas Kaberle’s injury, and that someone defending Cam Janssen is probably the last person you’d want to hear (read?) from. ANYWAY, I ask that you look at me today not as a Devils fan, but as a beacon of logic.

Was Janssen’s hit illegal? It was, in the sense that it came just a teensy bit too late. When watching the play develop, there seems an eternity between the pass and the check in which anxiety sets in, because you can see disaster ahead and are helpless to stop it. It’s that feeling you get watching a foolish victim in a horror movie open the closet door (the killer is always in the closet) or when a rollercoaster reaches the top of its initial ascent. In reality, it was 1.2 seconds. Certainly late, and certainly illegal by NHL rules.

In my mind, that’s the extent of Janssen’s wrongdoings. Go back and check the tape – the elbow is down, the players are facing each other, Janssen is gliding and not striding. All the benchmarks of a good, clean hit. The rest is circumstantial. Kaberle wasn’t looking and thus had no way to brace himself which, combined with the proximity to the boards, made the hit about 10 times more devastating than it would have been under normal circumstances. Because of the injury, I think a game misconduct or one-game suspension would have sufficed. But honestly, Janssen’s infraction typically costs a player two minutes. Suspensions should come with intended malice, I just don’t see that being the case here. I mean, it wasn’t like he intentionally elbowed Scott Niedermayer in the face at the end of a certain second-round playoff game (cough. cough.).

The logical reader now asks him or herself this: Well, smarty-pants, even if, fundamentally, Janssen’s hit was legal, why did he throw it? It wasn’t necessary in the context of play. That’s a good question. And I know you assume that it was intentional because of the role Janssen plays on the team and because of people’s natural instinct to think their worst of their peers. I’ve got no factual evidence to dissuade you, but I can say with a straight face that Janssen is not a dirty player.

I hate the term “goon.” It’s derogatory towards a group of hockey players that help define the sport. Janssen is a role player. His role is to be physical and to bring energy to the ice. He’s also young and on the periphery of this league. With the new rules, players of his ilk are being eradicated. He’s fighting (literally) for a job, and he gets precious few minutes on the ice to prove his worth. In this instance, he got overzealous and made a mistake. He is not the type of player to deliberately injure a player, and he showed genuine concern for Kaberle’s well-being and contrition after the game. It should be noted he hasn’t protested the check or tried to defend himself. The Devils have always been unapologetically physical, which may or may not be boring to watch, but they’ve never been a dirty team. I wouldn’t support one.

I’ve heard a lot of hyperbole about the hit, using it as a way to blast the NHL – because, I’m sure even we can agree, the only time the U.S. media touches hockey is to complain about its physical nature – and throwing Janssen to the lions. Frankly, I just don’t get it. This isn’t to undermine Kaberle’s injury – I hate to see anyone injured, and I hope Kaberle’s recovery is of the speediest kind. But to me it seems that this pales in significance to the Todd Bertuzzi and Marty McSorely incidents, as well as the one earlier this season that sparked a brawl between Buffalo and Ottawa.

The exaggerated punishment is a clear attempt at further eradicating the physical element of hockey, and that’s something I can’t stand for. Forget about Janssen. Doesn’t everyone love a good fourth-liner? I’m sure the Leafs will want revenge, and though I don’t necessarily believe the hit warrants it, I’m not objecting because I understand that’s the way hockey is, and that’s how I like it.

If we are going to be suspending players for hits with clean intentions, we are changing one of hockey’s core functions. Players will forever be afraid to throw a good body check because of the potential ramifications. That’s worse than bigger nets, shootouts, or tighter jerseys. It’s castrating the sport as we know it. Janssen’s suspension is the starting point on a slippery slope. If we continue on this path, the NHL will lose the roguish charm that attracted us all. It will be run with an iron first, a place where unintentional high sticks are sins and fights are viewed with the same affection as a malevolent tumor. The NHL will become a Nazi state, or something far worse – the NBA.



Feel free to post your comments here or to visit Tom over at The Out Route...