Grange on Leafs: The Grabovski gamble
Posted March 6, 2012 11:54 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Rooting against Mikhail Grabovski is like peeing on a mall Santa’s leg in a drunken stupor or telling a little kid that the Tooth Fairy is totally made up.
It’s a jerk thing to do.
Standing against the wall in the Toronto Maple Leafs dressing room on the first morning of the rest of his life, the beguiling Belarusian sounded exactly the way you want an athlete to sound moments after signing a five-year, $27.5-million contract.
Grateful. Humble. Sincere. Happy.
That he did it gamely in English, his tiny — sorry, he’s 5-foot-11 and 183 pounds in full equipment only — frame nearly swallowed up by the media surrounding him, made it even more endearing.
Grabovski is the Chocolate Lab of hockey players. He’s impossible not to like.
“It’s a nice feeling,” he said. “You protect your life for five years. Right now you can concentrate on hockey. For sure inside you feel much better than (when) you don’t have a contract.”
So good for Grabovski.
But the largest contract Brian Burke has given out in his four years running the Leafs raises some interesting questions, such as: is it worth it?
Are Burke’s Leafs in a position to be paying first line centre money — or close to it — to a guy who may or may not be the first line centre on a team so far behind the Eastern Conference’s elite they need GPS to find them, based on their 5-4 loss to the visiting Boston Bruins Tuesday night.
The defeat dropped Toronto to 0-5 against the defending Stanley Cup champions this season, though their goal differential worsened only marginally, from 17 to 18.
Challenged by new coach Randy Carlyle who said — quite correctly — that the Leafs had been embarrassed to this point by the Bruins this season, Toronto did little to alter the course of its season series.
They tried. Jay Rosehill fought dutifully. Colby Armstrong fought unsuccessfully. Tim Connolly wrestled Bruins pest Brad Marchand to the ice, to the surprise and delight of just about everyone.
And Grabovski flashed why he was deemed worth being the best-paid forward on the Leafs and the 36th richest forward in all of hockey as he gathered a pretty stretch pass from Clarke MacArthur and buried it behind Tim Thomas to pull the Leafs within a goal with just under seven minutes to play.
It was, perhaps fittingly, too little, too late.
Grabovski was understandably thrilled with the contract he earned as he hustles towards his second straight 60-point season and stands as Toronto’s plus-minus leader (insert tallest midget line here).
His is a story of overcoming long odds; of living with his parents and grandparents in a two-bedroom apartment in Minsk only to earn enough money to support multiple generations in one fell swoop.
Ignore for a moment that two of him can fit in Ryan Getzlaf’s jersey, and the Leafs remain without a physical, true No.1 centre or that the Bruins were pushing the Leafs around again Tuesday night thanks to gifted bruisers like Milan Lucic and Zdeno Chara.
“The competitiveness that (Grabovski) displays and the size that he is proves to us that little men can compete,” said Carlyle. “He’s displayed it and he’s been rewarded for it.”
Appropriately? It depends. It’s ironic that that his signing came a few days after Burke was in Boston at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference distancing himself from the value of advanced statistics in evaluating hockey.
“In hockey, statistics are more like a lamp-post to a drunk,” he said in standard Burkian high-definition colour. “They are useful for support, but not for illumination.”
Curious, because there are hockey insiders who look at the decision to sign an under-sized 28-year-old on a team that has missed the playoffs for seven years to a contract that long and that big as something you do on a bender.
Those that would defend it with the most vigour look at measures like Adjusted Corsi — which essentially tracks puck possession while a given player is on the ice, allowing for whether he starts his shift in the offensive or defensive zone.
Last season Grabovski was third in that category in the NHL, according to hockey analytics blog KuklasKorner.com, trailing only the Bruins’ Chara and the Vancouver Canucks’ Ryan Kesler.
Some excellent company.
Those that question the decision to sign Grabovski — undoubtedly driven by a thin free agent market this summer — use a much simpler calculation:
If the Leafs aren’t a playoff team with Grabovski in the lineup, why go to so much trouble to keep him? If the farm system is so stocked with promising and cheap young talent, why give a long-term deal with a limited no-trade clause to a player who presumably will block their advancement?
And what impact does signing Grabovski have on the Leafs being able to afford the true No.1 centre?
The answer goes to the heart of Burke’s four years in Toronto. Since the Combustible One has never embraced a long-term rebuilding project, time is forever of the essence.
It’s why you give a three-year contract to a veteran coach with a championship pedigree in a hopeless race to ninth place. It’s why you trade draft picks to a division rival like the Bruins, only to be reminded of the folly when 20-year-old Tyler Seguin lights up the Leafs again at the ACC like he did with a pair of goals and countless other chances Tuesday night.
It’s why you sign a player from the troubled present and expect different results in the near future.
Nothing against Grabovski, the delightful little centre who could. He deserves to get paid somewhere
But his deal in Toronto is all about Burke going all-in on the here-and-now, which may have already lost its charm.
