Introduction

I don’t think I really understood what draft day meant to me until I was sitting on my couch in the East End of Toronto watching it play out in the NHL Network’s studios in Secaucus, New Jersey, in October 2020. There was something about it that just felt off. Namely, we were in the middle of a pandemic. As I settled in, turned on the TV, rested my phone next to me, and began opening folders of notes on my laptop to prepare to write—which, on draft day, is an exercise in trying to keep up—I wasn’t excited. The magic of the day, a day normally filled with it, felt distant.

In normal times, the week of the NHL draft is the biggest thrill of my year. I spend each preceding season travelling the hockey world to watch and learn about the sport’s best young players, telling their stories from rinks and hotel rooms, and dissecting the ins and outs of their games (the oddity of which is not lost on me). When I’m not on the road, my days fill with video work, local junior and minor-pro games, and phone calls—a lot of phone calls. I write hundreds of thousands of words on every new draft class (enough to fill several books like this one), each of them in anticipation of two days in June. A few of the kids’ stories always seem to leave a mark, too, so much so that by the time their big day arrives I’m anxious to see where they’ll land—or whether they’ll be picked at all.

Then it all culminates with the adrenaline rush of days that begin and end in the early morning in one of the NHL’s cities.

When I’m in it, I try not to take it for granted. I try to live in the moment. To latch on to the overwhelming relief that follows after I hit send on my final piece on that year’s draft class and alert my editor that it’s ready. To tell myself that my preparedness paid off. To be thankful that this is my job.

Other journalists will tell you about those same feelings when the team they cover wins the Stanley Cup and they were among those who got to put history into words. I’m lucky enough to experience those feelings at the end of every year with my thing. The draft is my Stanley Cup.

But on the first Tuesday of October in 2020, it felt at first duller. I was meant to be in Montreal, sitting in a makeshift media riser typically installed at the rear of the lower bowl opposite the stage, surrounded by my colleagues, typing through every spare minute and running across the stands to speak with sources in all of the others. NHL scouts and general managers were meant to be intersecting on the draft floor, a buzz of uneasy parents, nervous players, and reassuring agents surrounding them. This time, though, in place of staging and handshakes and photo shoots, there was just me and my TV, and the players and theirs.

Maybe a little to my surprise, the feeling when I first sat down on my couch to watch it all unfold from afar didn’t last. When the draft started, 217 kids still got to live out the best day of their young lives, and the many thousands of people who played a part in their stories got to share in that moment, in that success, with them. And it all mattered just the same to each of those involved in that orbit as it did to all those who’d been picked in the 57 NHL drafts before it.

While it may have felt different, there was still magic in the people and their stories. There was magic in the phone call I got the following morning from Michael Rossi, the father of Marco Rossi, who’d just become the ninth overall pick of the Minnesota Wild, thanking me for telling Marco’s story. (Two years earlier, I’d moved in with Marco and his billet family for a weeklong stay for an immersive story, shortly after he’d moved from Austria to Canada to pursue his dream with the Ottawa 67’s.) There was magic in the text I got from Mairri McConnell immediately after her son, Zayde Wisdom, whose against-all-odds story had left one of those indelible marks on me, was selected in the fourth round by the Philadelphia Flyers. “I was just speaking about you. You are a big part of this. Thank you so much,” read her message. “Team Wisdom. I can assure you he will not let you down.”

For Michael and Marco, and Mairri and Zayde, when the last names Rossi and Wisdom were called, there was no point of reference, no consideration for what another draft day could have looked like, because they hadn’t lived any other. There was just their day, their story, and that magic.

In the weeks after their day, I began working on this book with them in mind. My only goal for the book became this: find and tell more of those stories. The only requirement was that they each be about the Leafs in some way or another.

Part of that equation comes easy. I’m from here. I was born and raised in Aurora, one of the city’s suburbs. Before moving back to nearby Newmarket to be closer to family in the winter of 2022, I called Toronto home for five years. My son, Beaumont, was born in the city’s east end, at Michael Garron Hospital, in the midst of my authoring this book. He has Toronto on his birth certificate. I know this place and I grew up on its team. Before reporting on the draft was my thing, reporting on the Leafs was.

Part of that equation is harder to solve, though. Because there may not be a team in pro sports whose stories have been chronicled as thoroughly as the Leafs’ have. Because telling someone else’s story takes trust, and patience, and a craft that I will work my entire life trying to hone and will never perfect.

In the pages that follow, I’ve endeavoured to go behind the scenes with the people who are at the centre of the big stories—the picks, the trades, the moments—while discovering and telling new ones you’ve never heard along the way.

You’ll hear from David Gregory, Walt McKechnie, Bruce Boudreau, Randy Carlyle, Bob McGill, Peter Ihnacak, Wendel Clark, Gord Stellick, Scott Thornton, Steve Bancroft, Danny Flynn, Drake Berehowsky, Todd Warriner, Staffan Kronwall, John Ferguson Jr., Luke Schenn, Dave Poulin, Chris Bergeron, Rico Blasi, Brendan Shanahan, Jack Han, and Ryan and Todd Tverberg. And you’ll read about many more.

I hope you’ll find the same magic in these stories as I did writing them and as my subjects did living them.