Brendan Shanahan speaks to the media during a press conference in Toronto in May, 2023.Arlyn McAdorey/The Canadian Press
Shortly after he took over as president of the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2014, Brendan Shanahan did a whistle-stop tour of local media.
He didn’t say much. I went back this morning and looked at the column I wrote off that nearly hour-long interview. I can feel myself stretching to find a single useful quote.
But I remember precisely the way he was – legs folded, body angled away, an arm across his chest. A concealing gesture. He could feel you assessing him, and defied that effort.
Outside the bell jar of an interview, he was different – garrulous and charming. Off the record, Shanahan is a Fran Lebowitz-level raconteur. If he ever chooses to do a no-punches-pulled book, it could be the most penetrating thing ever written about hockey, though I doubt he will.
On the record, everything with him came with an implied snarl. He played like that, and it was clear from the jump that he was going to manage the same. You would go a long way with him if you didn’t try to go very far.
It worked. If you’re going to reduce the last 11 years to one sentence, it’s this – Shanahan was brought in as a change agent, and things changed.
The ride ended Thursday, with a press release from his bosses and then a bloodless written statement from Shanahan. He leaves like he came – under cover of silence.
To assess him, it’s helpful to recall what the Leafs were like when he showed up – a complete mess. A travelling circus with a hard and fast schedule, from October to April. Often, the clowns were in charge.
What was the plan? It depended on who you asked. Everyone had an idea about how to fix the Leafs and – this was the real problem – all of them got their say.
Shanahan walked into the midst of things and everybody stopped talking. Armoured with championship rings, working-class Mimico roots and a stare you could feel when it landed on you, he was there to provide adult supervision. Like all Irish dads, he wasn’t going to waste time explaining himself. That reticence was his strength.
He showed up at the beginning of the year and said he was hopeful, and then again at the end to say they would be better next time around. After a while, he talked even less.
That worked when things were on the upswing – hiring Mike Babcock, winning the draft lottery, a steady series of top picks that turned out.
The high-water mark of the Shanahan era was spring 2017 – the return to the playoffs. The Leafs lost to Washington, but they were so young that all you saw was promise. There was finally a plan, and the will on top to see it through.
This is also where the weakness took hold, which was faith. Shanahan had too much of it.
He made a mistake all of us do, assuming that our own experience is universal. Like Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander, Shanahan had been a top prospect. Like them, he entered the league on a miserable team.
Unlike them, he had some rough sledding through the first half of his career. He was traded from New Jersey to St. Louis, and then Hartford. Everywhere he landed, Shanahan was the right man on the wrong team.
It wasn’t until his 10th year in the league that he found one that suited him. In Detroit, surrounded by other hard-minded veterans, playing under a tyrant of a coach, he won the Stanley Cup.
The lesson – that success in hockey is a matter of obtaining the most talented personnel early and then waiting for them to grow up.
Shanahan once told me that people often asked him what he missed about playing.
“And they expect me to say scoring goals or something like that …” – at this point he leaned in and showed me a fist – “… but what I really miss is fighting. That feeling of that first punch in the face.”
He meant his own face.
Having settled on a plan, this was not the sort of man to be dissuaded.
His belief in continuity extended to everything. He couldn’t let anyone go, and when he did it was already too late – Babcock, Kyle Dubas, Sheldon Keefe.
For a decade, Shanahan believed that Matthews, Marner, Nylander and eventually John Tavares could become the next Shanahan, Steve Yzerman, Nicklas Lidstrom and Igor Larionov. They disappointed him, and then they cost him his job. Not much of a thank you. I wonder if they’ll bother saying anything at all.
It is in the way of things that the qualities you are cheered for on the way in draw boos when you’re on the way out. Unlike so many of his flaky predecessors, Shanahan didn’t change. But everyone else did.
A decade ago, ‘pick a strategy and stick to it’ sounded revolutionary. Now it sounds like slow death.
There is a different version of this story that ended with Shanahan as the oracle who saw greatness in a few young players and built a dynasty by hitching their wagon to his. Instead, the thing people will remember about him is his stubbornness. It’s the reason things didn’t work out in Toronto, as well as the reason he’s in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
It may be hard for Leafs fans to miss him because he never allowed them to know him. That was another one of Shanahan’s old fashioned ideas – that nobody should be a bigger story than the men in uniform.
Some will call it a failure. I think of it as a remarkable human story. A scrappy hometown guy who’d fought his way to the top, renowned for his viciousness and craft, taking a Sisyphean job he didn’t need, to prove things that didn’t require proving, undone by his most prized ideal. That isn’t sports. It’s literature.
Who or whatever comes next is in his debt for the foreseeable future. Shanahan didn’t win titles, but he won back the franchise’s self-respect. He made it viable again. Far bigger talkers have done far less for the Toronto Maple Leafs.