Leafs’ Mitch Marner is having an MVP-level season – and it changes nothing
What a season Mitch Marner is having. If you want to talk him up as a true Hart Trophy candidate, you won’t get any pushback from me. He’s been a virtuoso, as we all saw Sunday when he took the Toronto Maple Leafs on his back with a two-goal effort against the Utah Hockey Club.
Tied for 12th in the NHL in points. Second in the NHL in primary assists per 60 at 5-on-5. Top 15 in 5-on-5 points per 60. First in the NHL in takeaways. Quick, Brad Treliving: extend the young man before it’s too late.
*Listens to earpiece*
Wait…I’m told those are Marner’s 2022-23 statistics. It turns out we’ve experienced these heroics before.
Did you know I was messing with you on first glance? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. Marner’s 2024-25 season has been magical to date. He’s as responsible as any Leaf for leading the team to a 7-1-0 record since Auston Matthews went down with an upper-body injury. During that eight-game stretch, Marner has seven multi-point efforts. Through Sunday night’s games, he was tied for 10th in the NHL in scoring. He led the NHL in primary assists on the power play. The Leafs’ vastly improved penalty kill sat sixth in the league in efficiency, and Marner led all Toronto forwards in shorthanded minutes played per game. He once again leads the NHL in takeaways. Among 170 forwards with at least 250 minutes played at 5-on-5 this year, only one allows fewer high-danger chances than Marner when he’s on the ice.
If the Professional Hockey Writers Association voted on the MVP today, Marner would deserve some down ballot votes – at worst. He’s been a heart-and-soul, all-situations horse, at his best when his team, which currently has six regular forwards on injured reserve, needs him most.
No one can take this tremendous quarter season away from Marner, who was the offseason’s most talked about trade candidate despite having control over his destiny with a no-movement clause.
But there seems to be a temptation in the current hockey discourse, online, offline and on the airwaves, to filter Marner’s amazing play in 2024-25 through the lens of his next contract negotiation. Is it time to extend Marner now before his price goes through the roof as an unrestricted free agent next summer? If William Nylander scored an eight-year pact with an AAV of $11.5 million, Marner has played his way into something starting with a 12, and an MVP-grade campaign would launch that number even higher into the stratosphere…right?
Maybe according to Marner’s camp, including his father Paul and agent Darren Ferris. They’d be insane not to try and leverage Marner’s play this season into a doozie of a contract.
The truth, though? Absolutely nothing has changed. No questions have been answered about Marner and what he means to the Leafs in the long term.
The reasons are twofold. The first is a compliment: this elite stretch of play from Marner, as I alluded to at the top of this column, isn’t new. Not by a long shot. Before this season, Marner was a two-time first-team All-Star at right wing and a one-time Selke Trophy finalist. He’d finished top four in the NHL in assists four times and points twice. He currently sits ninth among all active NHL players in career points per game, between Evgeni Malkin and Mikko Rantanen. Since Marner’s NHL debut in 2016-17, only five players have more assists. By the end of this season, he’ll rank top-five in Maple Leaf franchise history in scoring.
Especially factoring in his stellar defensive work, Marner is one of the best all-around right wingers of his generation. He’s on a Hall of Fame trajectory. That was as true three years ago as it is today.
Secondly: Whether you’re a Leafs fan, simply live in Toronto or you cover the team, you know the refrain: Wake us in April. It applies to the Leafs as a whole; while they have made extremely promising strides as a defensive team and in the crease year over year under new coach Craig Berube, none of it matters yet for a team with one playoff series win since 2004, a team that has gone 0-6 in winner-take-all games during the Matthews/Marner years. The Leafs of this era have reached the point at which they’ll only be judged on what they accomplish in the postseason. Individually, Marner embodies that struggle as much as any Leaf. His intelligent 200-foot game simply hasn’t translated to the trench warfare of the Stanley Cup playoffs, particularly deeper in series when Toronto plays in do-or-die games. Over the past five seasons, in Games 5, 6, and 7 of a series, Marner has no goals and five points in 16 games.
It certainly doesn’t hurt Marner’s future that he’s been such a world beater so far this season. It doesn’t change anything about his future either, however. Put another way: it shouldn’t change anything for Leafs management, and they’d be wise not to let Marner’s October and November spur them toward trying to extend his contract early. A minimum of $12 million will be a lot to commit if he continues to ghost in the postseason. Depending on how the rest of the year plays out, would you rather squirrel aside that money to pursue two of Sam Bennett, Aaron Ekblad and Nikolaj Ehlers, for example? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s not a decision that needs to be made yet.
Marner has always been an elite regular-season performer. We won’t know if he’s truly a changed man, and if that fateful offseason coffee meeting with Berube lit a new spark, until Toronto’s back is to the wall this spring. If Marner blends the same talent, leadership and determination then that he’s showing now, he’ll rewrite his story. But not until or unless that happens.
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