Phil Kessel’s success in Vegas proves players are people, not statistics

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After he’d got himself another ring on Tuesday night, Phil Kessel couldn’t help it. He had to gloat a little.

Kessel spoke to two Toronto-based reporters in the tumult directly after his Vegas Golden Knights won their first Stanley Cup. Each had the quote a little bit differently, but the gist was the same – Toronto said I couldn’t do it and now I’ve done it three times.

“Remember that,” Kessel said to them.

He’s right. The Maple Leafs and other teams in their position should remember it, but not exactly for the reasons Kessel means. In Toronto, Kessel was a good player on a dysfunctional roster that spun out into a miserable situation. He hated the media and the media hated him back. That became a feedback loop that defined the team. The circa 2015 Leafs squad was ‘us against the world’, and ‘us’ never made the playoffs.

Nobody cares if the players hate the media or vice versa – it’s good for business, actually – but once Kessel & Co. turned on the paying customers, that was it. Kessel was run out of town during a general clear out.

It wouldn’t be right to say that that’s when his career blossomed. It had already flowered in Toronto. Nobody said Kessel was anything less than a preposterously gifted offensive engine. But in Pittsburgh with the Penguins, Kessel found a place he belonged.

He no longer had to front the franchise off the ice. He could tuck himself in behind Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin and concentrate on being good at his job. Freed of the need to engage the media in nightly combat, quirky Phil Kessel, the guy who puts hotdogs in the Stanley Cup, could be born.

Three championships later, Kessel is a fringe candidate for the Hall of Fame.

Kessel seems to be suggesting that the lesson here is that he was always meant to achieve greatness and Toronto refused to see it.

While that may be true, there’s also a simpler Zen koan at work here – a change is like a vacation.

Kessel needed to leave to thrive. Given how it was before and how it turned out after, would anyone dispute that? Even Kessel?

Toronto (and Edmonton and Montreal and Vancouver and a few other places) aren’t for everyone. Hockey is the least of it.

If you’re wearing a suit and you walk into an NHL dressing room in most U.S. cities, a few of the players will think you work for the team. They’re not used to seeing strange reporters. In some places, they’re not used to seeing reporters period. The ones they do talk to often see themselves as evangelists for the game in hostile territory. That makes for friendly relations.

Walk into the dressing room in Montreal after a big game and it’s like a train station during a fire drill.

I once spent five minutes recording in a Bell Centre scrum because it was the only one I could wedge myself into. I ran back to a desk to transcribe what I’d got. It was only as I listened on headphones that I realized the whole thing had been in Swedish. You couldn’t hear a goddamned thing in there.

Some players enjoy that level of attention. Brad Marchand leaps to mind. Matthew Tkachuk is another one. They like the to and fro. They don’t get insulted easily. They don’t mind living in a city where they’re recognized everywhere they go.

Some other players learn to live with it, and others still bristle at it. Where it gets bad is when the player who despises attention is also one of the team’s stars.

I think bristling is the most normal reaction. If I had people shining camera lights in my face every time I had a bad night, I’d go bonkers. But that’s the job in Canada.

We spill a lot of ink in this country wondering why Canadian teams cannot win Stanley Cups. Let’s start with this principle – the players who work in this country are not intrinsically worse than the players who work in the United States, because they are all drawn from the same pool. So it’s something else.

What if it’s that ineffable cornerstone of all bad sports news conferences – culture.

Not the culture in the dressing room, but the culture around it. There is a difference between losing four games in Texas and no one says anything about it to you, and losing four in Edmonton and everyone on radio is wondering how you can show your face at the grocery store.

It takes an unusual person to embrace that madness. The proof is in the results, and recent Canadian results are abysmal.

Currently, Toronto has the most obvious culture problem. The executive is on war footing. The coach has become a zombie – neither living nor dead.

The Leafs’ players did go down swinging in the playoffs. Unfortunately, they were swinging at the media, not the other team.

Now they have a choice – roll the same main characters out there again, or send a couple of them off on vacation.

The obvious fear is in creating another Kessel – a guy you didn’t rate, who ends up hitting the jackpot elsewhere. But two things can be true at once here – that Kessel was a winner, and that the Leafs were right to get rid of him. He’s a winner who couldn’t win in Toronto.

Players are people and people are not statistics. You aren’t trading this many goals for that many goals. You’re switching out one human for another.

Along with all the hockey experts in their scouting departments, Canadian NHL teams could do with a couple of psychologists. Who’s going to thrive in this environment, who won’t and how do you tell the difference?

Losing over and over again when you should be winning is a good first clue. Then it’s a matter of having the confidence to move on and try something new. If you can’t be good, then be like Phil Kessel.