Mitch Marner was supposed to be a lifelong Leaf.

Marner, who spent nine years with the Toronto Maple Leafs, was drafted fourth overall by the team in 2015, at a point where the team had finally committed to a proper rebuild. While the buzz would eventually shift to the (successful) tank for Auston Matthews the year after, the idea of drafting a Toronto-born playmaker who displayed star potential in his junior days with the London Knights was enough to have jerseys flying off the shelves immediately upon arrival.

Fast forward ten years, and Marner is in his first season with the Vegas Golden Knights, getting prepared to return to Toronto for the first time on January 23. There’s speculation that the team will be letting the boo birds rain down on the once-treasured Maple Leafs star, made even more likely by the fact that travelling Leafs fans let Marner hear it in his home arena when the Leafs visited the Golden Knights on January 15.

So, how did we get here? Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at where things started, and continued to go wrong.

Everybody remembers the ‘we can and we will’ quote from then-Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas, referring to his ability to sign all three of Auston Matthews, Marner, and William Nylander to long-term deals. To his credit, he did end up doing that, but it was anything but a smooth road to get there.

Nylander held out of the first few months of the 2018-19 season before settling on a six-year contract worth just under $7 million annually, a deal that would prove to be a massive underpay on Toronto’s part. Matthews re-upped with the Maple Leafs on a five-year extension worth $11.6 million in February 2019, and what felt like mere days after, the contract discourse surrounding Marner had already begun.

For context, Marner was in the midst of what was a career year for him at the time. He wound up finishing the 2018-19 season with 94 points in 82 games, enough to lead the team in scoring, and his agent, Darren Ferris, was hellbent on ensuring Marner received the same treatment as Matthews did. Considering the team was fresh off of an exhausting contract process with Nylander, the fans had zero appetite for any form of a repeat, but Ferris made sure to defend his client’s right to what he believed was a fair deal. He spoke to the Toronto Star’s Dave Feschuk about it in February 2019 and kept things blunt.

“So far they’ve been trying to lowball (Marner),” said Ferris. “That’s the reason we’ve come to this point.”

Marner immediately brushed off his agent’s comments when he was asked about it shortly after.

“I didn’t see them,” Marner said. “Like I said, that’s something you’re going to have to talk to [Ferris] about. For me, it’s something I haven’t really been paying attention to. I’m just paying attention to this team in here and wanting to win.”

Marner’s efforts to curb the conversation around his negotiations worked, at least for the time being, and it wouldn’t reach headlines again until the weeks before training camp in 2019, with Marner still without a deal.

With the entire summer of 2019 passing by without any updates on Marner’s contract situation, fans started to accept the reality that they may be staring down Episode 2 of the Holdout Chronicles. Everything hit the fan on September 9th, when TSN insider Darren Dreger did an interview on TSN 1050, claiming that Marner was planning to play in Switzerland if the team couldn’t reach an agreement.

This obviously never materialized, but it sent the Maple Leafs’ fanbase into a frenzy with the regular season looming. It was short-lived, as Marner would sign a six-year extension worth $10.6 million annually four days after this interview aired. He started the season with the Maple Leafs, but not before one more uninspiring story emerged.

Immediately after inking his new contract extension, Marner travelled to Newfoundland, where the Maple Leafs were holding part of their training camp, and took part in a joint press conference with Dubas. While the general manager spoke about the relief that came with extending their star forward, he admitted that it wasn’t a deal that either party was completely satisfied with.

“I think Mitch would want more and we would want less, but it’s something that we both agree on and move ahead with,” Dubas said. “The way that we evaluate these things, we think that all of the contracts we’ve signed, that the players, their production, output, and what they bring to the organization, will match their level of pay, and I think we all hope they exceed it, and that sets them up well for their next contracts.”

I’d have to imagine that, at the time, Leafs fans were thrilled more than anything to have their core locked up and overlooked this quote, but in hindsight, it should have been a big red flag to have your general manager admit that he wishes it would have been cheaper while the player likely wished it was more, while Marner was standing right next to him.

Leafs fans are battle-tested, to say the least. They hadn’t won a Cup in over 50 years, they had yet to win a playoff series in the new era, and they had seen multiple playoff heartbreakers. Still, the Maple Leafs found yet another way to hurt their fans, and one more unique than ever before. On February 22, 2020, the Leafs faced off on home ice against the Carolina Hurricanes and saw their opponent lose both of their goaltenders to injury.

Hurricanes emergency backup goaltender, 42-year-old David Ayres, entered in the second period to try and save the game. He allowed two goals on two shots immediately, but the Hurricanes rallied around him and played an elite shutdown game to defeat the Maple Leafs 6-3. And thus marked the birth of the ‘zamboni driver’ jokes, referring to Ayres’ past as a zamboni driver for the Toronto Marlies. While this game obviously wasn’t all on Marner, he along with Auston Matthews faced the brunt of the criticism as the stars of the team, and Marner dropped his most controversial soundbite yet.

“It was a dogshit effort on my part,” Marner said following the game.

Some fans appreciated Marner’s transparency and acknowledgement that he didn’t play well enough, but the general consensus from fans was ‘you held out to be paid like a star, and we expected you to perform like a star, not to deliver dogshit efforts against a 42-year-old zamboni driver.’

The first round of the 2021 playoffs was a new low. Having just exited a global pandemic, the Leafs faced off against their longtime rival Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the 2021 NHL playoffs. While the Leafs took a 3-1 series lead into Game 5 at home, the Canadiens would go on to win three straight games, with Marner being held without a point in Game 6 and Game 7, finishing the series with four assists and no goals in seven games.

“It felt like in every game we had at least a couple of grade-A chances that just rolled off a stick, shot it too early, gotta have more patience with the puck,” a somber Marner told a room of reporters following their Game 7 loss. “Even today, I thought we were around the net, we had opportunities, just didn’t go in. It seems like it’s always the same stuff saying, so, you know, we gotta be better. Obviously, take a lot of pressure in yourself to want to be better, try to be better, so it’s disappointing.”

This loss can’t be blamed solely on Marner, but with the negotiations and Switzerland talk still fresh in the minds of Leafs fans and the pressure that comes with being a star player for the Maple Leafs, it was about the worst possible performance to prove to a fanbase you’re worth the money you’re being paid. To see him be so ineffective against a team that the Leafs were heavily favoured against marked a bit of a rock-bottom, in a sense.

In 2021-22, the league’s first somewhat normal season with traditional formats following the pandemic, the Leafs lost a hard-fought seven-game series to the Tampa Bay Lightning. Marner and Matthews faced the usual criticism, but to a lesser degree considering their production on the stat sheet and the fact that it truly came down to one bounce against a stacked Lightning team rather than the below-.500 Canadiens. The year after, the Leafs broke the curse and advanced to the second round, further alleviating the criticism in comparison to past years, and even though they weren’t competitive in the second round against the Florida Panthers, most of the media’s attention was on Kyle Dubas after he parted ways with the team.

Then came the 2023-24 playoffs against the Boston Bruins – another first round loss against a longtime foe, and another series in which Marner struggled to deliver offensively, with only one goal and two assists in seven games. Following the game, he was asked about his desire to stay in Toronto long-term, and he offered up another controversial soundbite.

“It means the world,” Marner said. “We’re looked upon as kind of gods here, to be honest. Something that you really appreciate.”

As we move along through this timeline, it’s important to acknowledge the increased temperature for every time Marner had to face the media after a bad loss over the years. While he might have been accurate in his description of how Leafs fans view their players, putting yourself in the same sentence as a god after you struggle to the tune of three points in seven games wasn’t what the fanbase wanted to hear at the time, and it didn’t help his relationship with said fans.

The 2024-25 season was Marner’s best in a Leafs uniform, and the most awkward alike. He cracked the 100-point mark for the first time in his career, finishing the season with 102 points in 81 games, but sitting in the final year of his last contract, he couldn’t escape the lingering cloud of his next deal. A month and change before the 2025 NHL Trade Deadline, the Colorado Avalanche shockingly made star forward Mikko Rantanen available for a deal. Rantanen was a proven star in the league, one who had playoff success under his belt, and with the uncertainty of Marner’s future in Toronto hanging around, new general manager Brad Treliving had to poke around.

The Leafs were reportedly in talks about a three-team deal with the Avalanche and the Hurricanes, one that would have seen Marner go to the Hurricanes. The Fourth Period’s David Pagnotta reported that the Leafs were on a shortlist of teams that Rantanen would have extended with, and when the Hurricanes asked for Marner, the Leafs approached him about waiving the no-trade clause. He declined to do so, Rantanen ended up going to the Hurricanes for a brief stint before landing with the Dallas Stars, and the Leafs ended up pivoting to Scott Laughton and Brandon Carlo.

It’s important to note that Marner shouldn’t be completely reamed for declining the trade. It was within his rights to do so, and with a baby on the way with his wife, it’s understandable that he didn’t want to pack everything up and move his life across the continent. Still, it didn’t sit well with the fans, who felt that Marner would be leaving anyway and thus depriving the Leafs of an opportunity to get some assets for him.

Marner bet on himself one final time in the 2024-25 playoffs with the Maple Leafs, and at first, it looked like it would pay off. Toronto defeated the Ottawa Senators in the first round of the playoffs, with Marner tallying seven points in six games and notching a point in each game except one.

Then came a rematch with the Florida Panthers in the second round, and while they hung in much better against the eventual Cup champions than they did two years prior, Marner’s offence once again dried up. He was held to one assist in the final four games of the series, and no points in a 6-1 loss on home ice in Game 7. To make matters worse, Marner was caught on tape screaming at his teammates to ‘wake the f*ck up’ after the Leafs allowed three unanswered goals, with some fans noting that his hair seemed completely dry.

While some fans could appreciate Marner showing a level of anger and passion that hadn’t been seen before, many believed that it was too little too late and saw it as hypocritical considering his lack of production in the back half of that series. Marner’s final playoff run with the Maple Leafs ended in an all-too-familiar fashion – underperformance, and an early exit.

Treliving quickly got to work following the season, signing both Tavares and Matthew Knies to extremely team-friendly deals. In the midst of all this, it became more apparent by the day that both Marner and the Leafs needed a fresh start, and the Leafs would eventually trade his rights to the Vegas Golden Knights in exchange for forward Nicolas Roy. Marner promptly signed an eight-year extension with Vegas worth $12 million annually, and just like that, the story was over.

If you’ve made it this far, I want to make it clear again that this is not meant to be a piece to vilify Marner. As much as both sides needed a change, it’s a true shame that the homegrown kid succumbed to the pressure of the Toronto market and couldn’t help deliver a Stanley Cup to a franchise that was so desperate for success. But, in the end, it always felt like a square peg in a round hole sort of fit. Marner is still finding his footing with his new team, and the Leafs have experienced their fair share of growing pains without their longtime two-way threat, but it felt like a move that had to be made for both sides.

The Mitch Marner story serves as a lesson: if you want to play for the Toronto Maple Leafs and you want to be appreciated by the fans, all you have to do is work hard and show the fanbase how badly you want to win for them. If you choose to go the route of maxing out your value in this market, the fans can overlook that, but you have to deliver on the ice if you want to escape criticism. Marner’s playoff production never held up to the money he was making, and the result was a sad ending to what could have been an all-time legacy cemented in the next iteration of Legends Row.

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