9. A Blockbuster Trade’s Forgotten Piece

The history of the NHL draft isn’t limited to the names that are called—there are also the trades that take place on its arena floors. Draft day has always been a natural place for transactions, as teams come together in the aftermath of playoff triumph or defeat to prepare for free agency and look ahead. General managers in the salary cap era wax poetic about how much easier it is to make a deal at the draft, when everyone feels like they’ve got money to spare and the flexibility to make something happen, than it is to pull one off at the actual trade deadline.

The Leafs’ history at the draft is no different. Some of their most notable recent trades have, for better or worse, happened on draft weekend—the Tyler Biggs move-up, the Luke Schenn–for–James van Riemsdyk swap, the Frederik Andersen trade. Others have happened on July 1 at the opening of free agency following conversations that began a week earlier at the draft—the Phil Kessel trade, the Nazem Kadri trade.

But there has never been a bigger transaction in Leafs history—and few bigger in the draft—than the one that took place on June 28, 1994.

When Gary Bettman stepped to the podium at the Hartford Civic Center to make it official, the crowd fell silent.

“I’d like to announce the following trade between Quebec and Toronto,” he said.

When he began reading off the names and picks involved, the crowd audibly gasped twice, first when he said Mats Sundin’s name and then again when he said Wendel Clark’s, the noise crescendoing into a murmur that extended over the stadium and reverberated through the broadcast.

The Nordiques had made Sundin the first overall pick in the 1989 draft just five years earlier, and the 23-year-old had already racked up 334 points in 324 games across four seasons in Quebec, including a 114-point campaign as the league’s 11th-leading scorer in 1993. Clark had just captained the Leafs to two deep playoff runs, was already one of the team’s most beloved players ever, and was fresh off scoring a career-high 46 goals in just 64 games. (Had he maintained that rate across 82 games, his 59-goal pace would have challenged Pavel Bure, who scored 60 in 76, for the Rocket Richard Trophy, besting Brett Hull’s 57 in 81 for second most.)

“I had a feeling there’d be a trade. I’ve had that feeling every year for the last five years now the way it’s been around here. I’m not shocked but I’ll miss Toronto,” a visibly angry Clark told reporters later that day.

The rest of each of their stories has been told and written. The Leafs traded their 14th captain for their 16th when Sundin was eventually named Doug Gilmour’s replacement in 1997, in what was by then his fourth of 13 seasons with the organization. Clark played just one season as an assistant captain with the Nordiques before the fledgling franchise moved to Denver. Less than two seasons after the trade, he was back in Toronto wearing an “A” underneath Gilmour for one season and then Sundin for his first. Sundin never carried the Leafs as far as the Cup, but he twice led them to the conference finals in 1999 and 2002 and the trade survived as a home run that brought an Olympic gold medalist, eight-time All-Star, and future Hall of Famer to Toronto.

But there were also six other pieces involved in the transaction whose lives and careers were impacted by that moment—and a web of others who were dealt and redealt to acquire them. Defenceman Sylvain Lefebvre’s move from Toronto to Quebec as a small part of the deal led him to three years as an assistant captain with the Avalanche after the Nordiques moved—winning a Stanley Cup with them in 1996—and eventually a job as a scout and assistant coach with the Avalanche, which has led to a near-two-decade-long career behind NHL and AHL benches. Prospect Landon Wilson, who the Leafs had drafted 19th overall a year earlier, never got a real look with the Avalanche after he was a part of the deal. He was traded a couple of years later to the Bruins as part of a subsequent move that brought back another 19th overall pick (which they used on a different defenceman and longtime NHLer Robyn Regehr). Those two early trades preceded a career of bouncing from one NHL club—and its AHL affiliate—to another for Wilson. Veteran defenceman Garth Butcher’s move from the Nordiques to the Leafs led to his retirement when his lone season in Toronto became the last of his career. The teams also swapped 1994 first-round picks, with Toronto moving up from 22nd to 10th as part of the trade. The Leafs turned around and dealt the 10th overall pick (which became AHL-NHL journeyman Nolan Baumgartner) and Rob Pearson to Washington for veteran Mike Ridley, who’d just posted 70 points in 81 games as the Capitals’ leading scorer, and the 16th overall pick, which they used on goalie Eric Fichaud. Fichaud, who went on to play in an NHL net 95 times, never played any of those games for the Leafs after he was dealt again in April 1995 for forward Benoit Hogue, a 1995 third-round pick (which became Ryan Pepperall, who never made it past the farm team in St. John’s) and a 1996 fifth-round pick (which became fighter Brandon Sugden, whose minor pro career ended due to ugly post-concussion syndrome realities he has spoken openly about). The Nordiques used the 22nd overall pick on Jeff Kealty, who played just one pro season in the IHL after he graduated from Boston University but has worked as a scout, director of scouting, and assistant general manager with the Nashville Predators for more than 20 years.

But none of the trade’s forgotten-about pieces were impacted by it quite like 20-year-old Todd Warriner.

* * *

Todd Warriner watched the 1994 NHL draft from his grandfather Art’s house in Blenheim, Ontario. He was there with his parents, Ivan and Janet, and his sister, Julianna, because they lived in the Chatham-Kent countryside outside of the small town of a few thousand people and Art was the only one who had TSN. There was already discussion about a potential trade between his Nordiques and the Leafs as the broadcast went live.

Once Bettman stepped to the podium, Warriner and his dad turned to each other, exchanging a hopeful glance that he may be involved in the trade that was to come.

“Well, maybe this is it,” they said to each other.

They were hopeful for myriad reasons that spanned all the way back to his own draft two years earlier.

In advance of the 1992 NHL draft in Montreal, Warriner was one of its star prospects. That year, he’d scored 41 goals and 83 points in 50 games, which made him a second-team All-Star in the CHL and won him the CHL Top Draft Prospect Award as the league’s No. 1–ranked draft-eligible player.

In advance of the draft weekend, Lightning president and general manager Phil Esposito, who held the first overall pick, had flown Warriner into Tampa and called him once a week to deliver the same message: “You’re my guy, you’re my guy,” he’d told him.

On the Thursday before the draft, Warriner’s agent, Don Meehan, picked him up in his convertible and drove him to Montreal, stopping at Harry Rosen along the way to buy him his “first overall suit.” But that Friday, the mood dampened when Meehan received a phone call in his hotel room from Esposito explaining a change of plans. In their first year as an expansion team, Tampa’s Esposito told Meehan he wanted to let his scouts run the table and his scouts had decided in their final meeting that they preferred Czech defenceman Roman Hamrlik.

After hanging up the phone, Meehan quickly called Warriner, who answered from his hotel room as he prepared to leave for dinner, less than 24 hours before he was supposed to head to the arena to rise to its podium. When Meehan was done relaying Esposito’s message, Warriner spoke out in disbelief.

“Well, shit, what happens now then?” he said.

“Well, I think we might be able to get you to Toronto at No. 8,” Meehan answered.

“Fuck, eight? I’m going to fall to eight? Oh, my god. That’s going to be a bit of a story. Am I all of a sudden the eighth best player?” he replied.

The news was particularly shocking because Warriner had had discussions with a few teams throughout the season and into April, but he hadn’t interviewed with any team other than Tampa in the six weeks leading up to the draft.

“Not one team,” Warriner said on a phone call from his Southern Ontario home in the summer of 2021, nearly three decades later. “Everybody just sort of assumed that I was going to Tampa and there was no reason to talk to Warriner.”

Though he didn’t come right out and tell his family that he expected to go first overall, he did tell them that he had a good feeling, so many of them who joined him on the draft floor were expecting him to get drafted right away—and there wasn’t enough time for him to warn them.

Due to how late in the process they learned that Esposito wasn’t going to be able to pick him, Warriner and Meehan sat in their seats completely blind to where he was going to go.

“We had literally no idea,” he said.

After the Lightning started things off by taking Hamrlik, the Senators selected Alexei Yashin and the Sharks followed suit with defenceman Mike Rathje.

Then came the Nordiques, who were the only team Meehan didn’t want to select Warriner. He shared the hockey world’s concerns about their ownership and a weakening Canadian dollar. (The early 1990s were an era of significant financial turmoil for the Nordiques, Flames, Senators, and Oilers as salaries rose with the U.S. dollar, resulting in a Senators ownership change and the Nordiques’ move, and nearly a move by the Oilers and Flames, as well.)

With Warriner’s family to his left and Meehan to his right, longtime NHL scout and general manager Pierre Gauthier, who then worked as a scout for the Nordiques, made eye contact with Meehan, their jersey tucked under his arm, to mouth, “We’re taking your guy.”

“Oh, shit, Quebec’s going to take you,” Meehan told Warriner with a nudge.

At the time, Warriner didn’t really care, not fully understanding the machination that Meehan had to consider. Warriner doesn’t remember much of what happened in the moments after they called his name and he descended the stadium’s steps to meet them on the floor, either. There was a blur of interviews, which he guesses he spun his wheels through. There was glad-handing. But his first vivid memory of the moments after the pick is of the cheer he got from its French Canadian crowd as he pulled on the Nordiques jersey.

In the moment, he found the crowd standing to cheer him to be a bit much. The reception, he said, was incredible. And then it dawned on him that the reason they were so supportive was because Eric Lindros hadn’t done it a year earlier when the Nordiques had selected him first overall.

That was really the only nice moment he had with the Nordiques organization, though. In his first year as a member of the organization, he and Meehan quickly learned that he wasn’t going to get comparable money to the players who were selected around him. After completing his OHL career with the Spitfires and the Kitchener Rangers following a trade, he spent his second postdraft season training out of Calgary and travelling the world with Team Canada in advance of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. He played in 54 games for Canada that year, participating in the Deutschland Cup as well as exhibitions against NHL teams and tours of Europe in search of new opponents on a team that rotated a slew of players in and out and eventually included Paul Kariya and Czech defector Petr Nedved (once he became a Canadian citizen).

The Leafs, who would have indeed taken him eighth overall more than a year earlier had he been available when they selected center Brandon Convery (who went on to play 50 of his 72 career NHL games for the Leafs in parts of two seasons), kept a close eye on Warriner, watching him in a game at Maple Leaf Gardens in January against the Americans before following him to Lillehammer in February.

Leafs general manager Cliff Fletcher then sought out Warriner’s parents in the crowd during one of Canada’s warmups.

“Hey, I’m Cliff Fletcher,” he told them from the row behind them inside Lillehammer’s Håkons Hall.

“Yeah, we know who you are,” Janet answered.

“I just wanted to say hello and say that we’re really fond of your son and we’d like to try to get him in a deal at some point,” Fletcher told them.

Armed with that information, Janet and Ivan decided not to tell their son until after the Olympics were finished, believing it was best not to distract him with it. It wasn’t until after the tournament was over, when Canada had returned with a silver medal after falling to the Swedes in a dramatic shootout (a gold medal game that included Peter Forsberg’s now-famous, postage-stamped one-handed goal) and Warriner had returned with an ankle injury, that his dad tried to soften the blow with details of their run-in with Fletcher.

After the Olympics, Warriner and his bum ankle joined the Nordiques for his first official professional stint with its AHL team, the Cornwall Aces, and he played in 10 of their playoff games. But when the year was done and uncertainty loomed over the Nordiques and his place within them, he wondered if anything would come of Fletcher’s February words. The interest the Leafs expressed to Meehan and then Warriner’s parents wasn’t his only connection to the team to that point, either. A couple of years before his own draft, Warriner had visited longtime Leafs athletic therapist Chris Broadhurst and the team’s doctors to rehab a knee injury.

“I’d spent a fair bit of time around the staff. I knew everybody,” Warriner said.

Though he didn’t know many of their players, he’d also gotten to know Clark through his Windsor head coach Brad “Motor City Smitty” Smith, who’d played on the Leafs in the ’80s, and Meehan, who also represented him.

“I knew him from Madison Avenue summers,” Warriner joked of time spent at Toronto’s Madison Avenue pub with the Leafs legend.

While he was thrilled by his inclusion in the trade when Bettman delivered the details, he actually caught himself feeling a little disappointed that Clark, who was also one of his favourite players, was going the other way.

The move was also a personal thrill, as a kid from Ontario, and a much-needed professional change of scenery. Once he arrived back home to his parents’ place after the draft, there was already a message from Meehan, who was on good working terms with the Leafs’ brass, sharing in his excitement.

“Quebec was going sideways, and just trying to get a contract was a struggle there. We couldn’t even get into the plans there,” Warriner said.

Because the move happened before his off-season had really begun, it also made for a fun summer. In the days after the trade, Fletcher brought Warriner to Toronto to meet everyone and promise him an opportunity. He spent part of that summer training in Toronto under Leafs assistant coach Mike Kitchen, who would regularly bring a bunch of the local players out to Christie Pits, an urban park in the city’s West End, to go for runs led by Doug Gilmour and himself. After their runs, they’d usually end up at Madison Avenue or the Brunswick House, another popular Toronto bar the players frequented.

“I was just a pretty wide-eyed kid at the time,” he said, laughing at the memories of getting dragged around town by Gilmour and his crew.

In his first training camp with the team, though, things went about as poorly as they could have. He was hit in the face with a puck in just his second scrimmage. His eye closed over, and the Leafs wouldn’t let him skate for a few days until he could open it again. Two practices after he got back, he crashed into the boards and dislocated his shoulder. And then, just as camp broke, the league entered a lockout.

With his arm in a harness, the Leafs sent him to St. John’s to join the farm team, where things got worse when he tried to play when he wasn’t fully healthy in an effort to make an impression. In the process, he fell out of favour with St. John’s head coach Tom Watt, who had him bouncing in and out of the lineup until Christmas.

“I wasn’t really part of Tom Watt’s plan and I kept thinking, ‘This guy isn’t going to play me and I’m not healthy enough to get more ice time anyways, so I don’t have a leg to stand on,’” Warriner said.

By the time the lockout ended in January, his start in St. John’s had gone so poorly that he was shocked when the Leafs called him up for his NHL debut and a two-week stint with the big club. The call-up didn’t help him get back on track, though. After one back-to-back against the Red Wings, he left the two games thinking, Holy cow, this is the NHL? And, Wow, I need to get a whole lot better.

“I was nowhere near ready. I’d been hurt, I hadn’t played enough, and when you’re living in Newfoundland and you’re not playing, you’re only doing one thing,” Warriner said, chuckling to himself about the bad habits that carried over from Madison Avenue and the Brunswick House. “I had to take stock of where I was at, to be completely honest.”

The following summer, the then 21-year-old’s perspective—and work ethic—changed. He moved into one of Meehan’s apartments in Toronto, and he got to work rehabbing his “still messed up” ankle and shoulder a few times a week for three months.

The results followed when he played well in his second training camp, a run of play that left him thinking, Wow, I should be close when he was asked to join the team’s final 28 players in Collingwood to finish out the preseason. As the camp’s end neared, he was then invited into a meeting with head coach Pat Burns and Kitchen.

“Well, you’ve had a pretty good run…” Burns told him.

Well, that doesn’t sound like my run’s coming to an end, he thought to himself.

“…but we’re going to send you down. And I don’t know what happened last year, but you have to earn your promotion.”

Warriner pleaded his case.

“I think I can play, and I don’t want to go to the minors because I’m not sure Tom Watt likes me and I don’t think he’s going to play me. He wouldn’t play me last year in the playoffs and I don’t know how that’s going to change,” Warriner told them.

“The game doesn’t owe you anything,” Burns told him, fully closing the door on an immediate opportunity.

Determined to prove them—and Watt—wrong, things went better the second time around, and a month into the season Warriner earned a promotion when forward Bill Berg went down with an injury.

That second call-up changed the trajectory of his career, and though he never became the player he or the Nordiques thought he would, Warriner spent the next seven seasons in the NHL before he was ever sent back to the AHL, five of which were spent with the Leafs. On February 20, 1999, he became a small part of Leafs history when he scored the first ever goal at the newly opened Air Canada Centre. After stops in Tampa Bay, Phoenix, Vancouver, Philadelphia, and Nashville, he finished his NHL career with 154 points in 453 games, including 253 with the Leafs.

Fletcher stood by him every step of the way, trading for him three different times in his career (first with the Leafs, then the Lightning, then the Coyotes). Whenever he sees Fletcher, Warriner thanks him for believing in him.

“I always say you need a guy in your corner and for me that guy was Cliff Fletcher. I might not have had an NHL career if not for Cliff,” Warriner said. “He went to bat for me, and you need that.”

He eventually left the NHL behind in 2003 and spent six more seasons playing professionally in Finland, Switzerland, and Germany before retiring in 2009.

When he looks back at his two draft day experiences in 1992 and 1994, he’s now able to laugh about both. Whenever he now watches the draft, he sees his own naivety in the kids who are picked and Meehan’s gears turning in the agents seated next to them.

“I didn’t really care that the Nordiques drafted me because I didn’t really know any of the political backroom stuff,” Warriner said. “That changes as your career moves along.”

In retirement, he took up coaching with the University of Windsor’s men’s hockey team and broadcasting in junior hockey, first for Spitfires games and then as part of Sportsnet’s CHL coverage.

Both roles gave him new perspective of his own draft experience, his development from prospect to player, and the way the game has changed.

“It’s even more competitive now, the depth of talented players. Even the ones we get at the University of Windsor, I think about how there are players in our loop who I coach now or against who I’d loved to have had as a linemate in the minors because they’re that good. It really came full circle when I went to Europe later in my career, too, and I went, ‘Whoa, that guy’s good, who’s that?’” Warriner said. “For every Russian that comes over, there’s a couple that don’t that could come over and play but they’re making $2 million in the KHL. Some of the German players between Leon Draisaitl and Uwe Krupp, there were some darn good players who could’ve played. And the same was true of the Swiss and Finns. Even some of the players I played with, I’d go, ‘Try it’ and two of three would always go, ‘Yeah, I’d like to, but I can just play here and make $150,000 at home and I don’t want to get stuck in the minors in a place I don’t want to be.’”

These days, he says hockey fans are more likely to recognize him for his broadcasting work with Sportsnet than as a former Leaf.

His years with the Leafs remain the fondest of his career, though.

He enjoyed St. John’s a little too much in those early years, which he’ll be the first to admit.

“Newfoundland was incredible. I remember thinking, ‘This is a bad place for the minor league team because the guys love it here.’ I used to always say that you want the minor league spot to be OK, but you don’t want it to be that good because you need there to be an incentive to get out of there. There was a point late in that first year where [journeyman forward] Kelly Fairchild and I were both hurt and the team went on the road for 12 days and we didn’t go, so you’re just on the island left to your own devices and having a little too much fun and then I remember midway through it we looked at each other and we were like, ‘We’ve got to get it together here a little bit. This isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing,’” he said, laughing to himself. “And that’s really the truth. I liked the lifestyle, and the guys had a lot of fun out there. It was a great place to live, and it feels like it’s a long way from the NHL.”

Were it not for the Sundin–Clark trade, the shoulder injury, or the reality check that was his five-game stint with the Leafs in that first year, Warriner’s not sure if he ever would have made it.

“There’s a critical point where you have to take stock and figure it out or not. I realized I wasn’t putting the work in that I needed to yet. I was 20 and I needed to get my shit together,” Warriner said. “Otherwise, like so many guys who played in Newfoundland, I’d still be there.”

Though he and Sundin only knew each other through his two training camps with the Nordiques before the trade, that small familiarity brought them closer together when they both arrived in Toronto not really knowing any of the other players. Today, whenever they run into each other at events in Toronto, they light up. During a recent round of golf, Warriner and one of his old teammates, Matt Martin, called Sundin from the course to share some laughs and memories.

“I love Mats. We were instantly connected thanks to the trade. We spent a lot of time together in Toronto at dinners in the city. He lived south of Bloor on Bay for quite some time, and a bunch of us who lived downtown would spend the afternoons at his place. He was awesome. He was good to us,” Warriner said. “And the older guys, too. When we first got there, the Dave Andreychuks and the [Doug] Gilmours and the Dave Elletts took care of us. And just before I left, Mats was the leader and the guy who was bringing people in. We have a good friendship. We were tight.”