Ever wondered how the Maple Leafs really feel about their teammates? Welcome to part two of this year’s player poll, a glimpse inside the 2024-25 Leafs.
In case you missed it, part one can be found here. Part one reveals why one Leaf doesn’t participate in surveys. We also ask which player is the most opinionated and attempt to settle the William Nylander-Auston Matthews style debate.
In part two, we’re looking at which Leaf gives the best advice and who is going to make the best coach or media member after their playing careers are done. We also go inside the group chat and reveal players’ phone habits.
A reminder on the (not exactly scientific) methodology: We crafted 12 questions with the goal of shedding light on the personalities behind the players. Twenty-two Leafs answered our questions over the past three months. Some had multiple responses to individual questions (even when only one was called for). Some had no response to certain questions at all.
The role of the NHL veteran is to provide stability on and off the ice. And very quickly, the Leafs have become one of the most veteran-heavy teams in the NHL. That made us curious: Who is earning the ears of teammates?
Not surprisingly, the votes made up for a healthy split. Different veterans provide different types of advice.
First, the obvious: John Tavares. The parent of three has learned to lean on the side of positivity.
“(Tavares) looks at things through a lens that’s encouraging, which is why it’s effective,” Bobby McMann said. “He’ll say ‘You were in a good spot there, call for it next time.’ He’ll tell you things are good, but you just need to alter things a little bit.”
“He’s got a lot of experience and he’s a smart guy, so I like listening to his advice,” David Kämpf said of Tavares.
Want the straight truth? Go to newcomer Chris Tanev. He’s seamlessly adapted to life as a Leaf with his penchant for telling things exactly how they are.
“He’s a warrior, he’s been around, he’s battled through injuries,” Philippe Myers said of Tanev, before sharing an example of what he’s heard from his fellow defenceman: “Shit’s going to happen, so you just have to keep going and stay positive.”
Tanev’s advice is so effective it led Simon Benoit to think of him in the lone vote he cast in this survey.
“I don’t just talk to (Tanev) about hockey. He’s a pretty f—ing simple, direct guy. He is so straightforward,” Benoit said.
There was a time when Jake McCabe didn’t feel as comfortable speaking up in the Leafs room. But those feelings have dissipated. Tanev said he goes to McCabe as a shoulder to lean on, and he’s not alone.
“For me, with my shoulder, (McCabe) went through the same sort of thing and he was great to lean on,” Connor Dewar said. “He was also great when I got here because he’d played with guys in Buffalo that I played with in Minnesota: (Nick Foligno), (Zach Bogosian). We went through a similar situation. Just the way he plays, I look up to him. He plays hard and he takes care of himself.”
Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s lone vote came from Steven Lorentz after the two connected during last season’s Stanley Cup run with the Florida Panthers.
“He’s a great mentor,” Lorentz said. “He has so much experience and he’s easily approachable. He’s not blowing smoke. He’s going to say things the way they are.”
Mitch Marner had three choices: Rielly, Tavares, and Ryan Reaves. “Pretty calm, cool, collected with their opinions,” he said. “They’re not biased with stuff. They’ll just tell you the truth.”
Marner is right. Rielly, the longest-tenured Leaf, has plenty to say. And if you know how lighthearted but genuine Rielly can be, you’ll know how much his teammates want to be around him.
“I’m gonna say Mo,” Reaves said.
Rielly was across the dressing room when he heard his teammate’s answer.
“What’s that? Best-looking guy?” Rielly said with a grin.
“If you want serious advice, go to Johnny. If you want the ‘Good Cop,’ you go to Morgan,” Matthew Knies said.
Rielly couldn’t help but smile, again, hearing that.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said.
This was nearly a landslide and with good reason.
“We know the answer to that one,” Marner said. “(Ryan Reaves) must have been the runaway for sure.”
Reaves indeed ran away with it. He isn’t just loud. He’s well-spoken, insightful, has lengthy NHL experience and isn’t afraid to speak his mind. Reaves would be a welcome change to an NHL media environment that can be too buttoned-up. And judging by how his Leafs teammates quickly pointed to him when asked this question, we’re not alone in our assessment.
“I’ve thought about (doing media) and I’ve had a few agencies call me over the last few years. I guess they thought I’d retired,” Reaves quipped. “My hang up with it is I would rather do something like ‘Spittin’ Chiclets’ or ‘Inside the NBA’ where you can speak freely and have a little fun and it’s not so dry. Hockey doesn’t do a very good job at marketing the game because they want everything to be so black and white. You can’t have a very strong opinion about things, you can’t have fun with things. I feel like we fall behind other sports in that regard. That would be my hang-up to just going anywhere on TV.”
Marner, another talkative Leaf, garnered some votes. Lorentz’s logic behind voting for Marner makes serious sense.
“(Marner) had gotten some heat so he knows the good and the bad side of (the media). He navigates it very well,” Lorentz said.
Finally, let’s not forget about Benoit. He’s quick with a self-deprecating joke and could be a future broadcaster, with a caveat.
“It has to be a French channel, though,” McMann said.
Talk about a split vote. In total, 12 Leafs garnered votes as likeliest to step behind the bench when their playing careers are finished.
“We’ve got some high-IQ guys on the team,” Lorentz said.
If that’s the case, it’s no surprise Tavares won the vote.
“(Tavares) has a lot of experience. He can understand hockey pretty good. I think he would be a great coach,” Kämpf said.
McCabe, for one, doesn’t mind the idea of coaching.
“But not at the pro level,” he said.
McCabe marvels at how often professional coaches are fired and how short their tenures often are. But the idea of coaching somewhere with more security and the opportunity to make a long-term difference like, say, the college level? The veteran defenceman would be into that.
Reaves feels more strongly about coaching.
“He’s the only one I know who actively wants to be a coach,” Rielly said.
Other players who got votes did so, again, because their smarts stick out.
“Pontus Holmberg is a really smart player. His English isn’t the best, but he takes knowledge and it isn’t in one ear and out the other. He could coach in Sweden,” Lorentz said.
Given his star status in Toronto, Marner will likely have no shortage of avenues to take once his playing days are finished. Could coaching be the route he takes?
“(Marner) has just got a good mind for the game. I can see him being an assistant, a players’ coach,” Conor Timmins said.
“He’s always watching video,” McMann said of Marner. “He sees the game and understands it well. I understand he’s animated and emotional, but he also knows the game so well, and there’s a reason for that.”
Coaching won’t be for every Leaf, though.
“We’ll see how much I like retirement and being at my house and relaxing,” Marner said.
Holmberg threw Ekman-Larsson a vote. And as the defenceman heard Holmberg, he threw that vote right back.
“You picked me? For what?” Ekman-Larsson said.
“Coach,” replied Holmberg.
“Coach?!” Ekman-Larsson asked incredulously, shaking his head before walking away.
Remember when Brad Treliving signed then-free agent Ryan Reaves in 2023 because the Leafs GM thought the team needed “a little more noise?” Well, spend a few minutes inside the Leafs’ group chat and you’ll find that the 15-season veteran has cranked things up to 11.
“It can be the most random time in the summer and no matter what, you’ll see ‘RR’ pop up on your phone,” Nick Robertson said.
Every group chat needs an instigator; someone to keep the dialogue alive during low points. On and off the ice, Reaves fills that role.
“(Reaves) has a comment about everything. He likes to get involved. It might be chirping guys, he might be backing guys, but he’s always in there,” McMann said.
It’s been fascinating to watch Reaves’ evolution within this Leafs team. Treliving clearly values intangibles and wants players who provide spirit within a dressing room, even if that means they don’t provide consistent offence on the ice. Reaves was a hit with Leafs fans early on last season before his play lagged. There was a late-season bump. This season, he’s often been a healthy scratch, but his role off the ice has not diminished. When he’s not playing, Reaves still stands at the front of the team to hype players before they take the ice.
Reaves is no shrinking violet. And his teammates appreciate how that manifests in their group chat.
“It’s little things, little jokes, but he’s good with stuff like, ‘Oh, did someone lose something, I found this.’ He’s a really good presence on the chat. It’s not too much,” Lorentz said.
“Anything that he finds funny, he’s posting in there,” Myers said.
Reaves gladly accepts that he’s become the team’s social director, which manifests on tiny screens.
“If there’s something to chirp somebody about, it will be put on a group chat. If there’s some kind of scheduling, a lot of times I’ll put that up there: away from the rink it’s team parties, fine fund, money on the board. But a lot of times it’s just banter,” Reaves said.
The only other player who garnered any serious votes shouldn’t come as a surprise to Leafs fans: the same player who was once voted the loudest on the team, Mitch Marner.
We’ve all seen it happen before in group chats, too. The dialogue gets hijacked by two people, leading everyone else to quietly wonder why those two don’t take it outside. Most of the Leafs surveyed insist the team group chat is a healthy place, with room for improvement.
“Ryan Reaves and Mitch Marner,” Rielly said when asked for his vote. “But they basically talk to each other on the group chat, which I think is criminal.”
Marner insists there’s a reason for this.
“I’m the guy that plans all of our fun events for the team and Reavo also does that. We’re just the most active, because we’re just throwing in ideas to try to get the guys together,” Marner said. “If no one responds to Reavo … he doesn’t like that, so I’ll reply once in a while to him.”
Often the youngest player on the Leafs this season (second-youngest when Fraser Minten is around), Knies, not surprisingly, drew a lot of nods from his teammates when it comes to the team’s screen-time leader.
“It’s got to be Matthew Knies,” Robertson said.
McCabe, Marner and Max Pacioretty agreed. So did Joseph Woll, but with a caveat: “He’s the hardest to get ahold of. But he’s on his phone the most.”
“Him and Conor Timmins scroll TikTok for hours,” Rielly said of Knies.
The 22-year-old felt he was being unfairly maligned.
“I think it’s just because I’m the youngest on the team, so they’re going to put it on me,” he said.
Knies recalled a team dinner when the subject of screen time came up. Everyone checked their phones for the actual numbers. “I was in the average of everyone else,” Knies insisted.
“It’s just to pass the time,” he continued. On one of the team’s many flights, for instance.
Knies will send texts, he’ll FaceTime friends back home, scroll TikTok, just as Rielly suggested, and YouTube as well.
“I just like watching videos,” Knies said.
“I’ll throw Kniesy under the bus,” Ekman-Larsson said, concurring with the masses.
Minten, too, the elder Swede added as the 21-year-old strolled by in the dressing room. “Look, right now,” Ekman-Larsson said. Minten was looking at his phone.
For Minten, though, the choice was obvious: Knies.
Someone known for his phone habits, but with a more old-school approach: Benoit.
“He’s always making phone calls,” Dewar said.
“Ugh, Benny. 100 percent,” Timmins agreed. “He’s making phone calls 24/7 — on the bus, in the change room, everywhere.”
Holmberg concurred. Every time he looked, he said, Benoit had a phone in his hand.
“He has a lot of business phone calls,” Kämpf said.
And as Dewar and Timmins both noted, those calls were always in French for the native of Laval, Que.
“Someone young,” said the 35-year-old Tanev, pondering the question. “Let’s see …Willy.”
Nylander looked in Marner’s direction. So did Knies and Lorentz.
“But that’s only because he does the music around here,” Lorentz said. “That’s not a bad thing, right?”
“You can probably just put all of the above,” Tavares said. “We all probably spend too much time (on our phones).”
But then the former captain selected one above the rest: Domi.
McMann agreed: “It’s always fantasy football and checking scores, usually.”
Despite being on his phone so often, Knies is one of those people who is apparently still hard to get ahold of. (We all know the type!)
“He left me hanging a couple times this summer,” Rielly said while also putting Nylander in the slow-to-respond category.
“He thinks it’s cool,” Rielly said of Nylander.
Nylander conceded as much. “Me,” he said of the teammate who was slowest to respond.
Sometimes Nylander saw the messages. Sometimes he didn’t. “Eventually I’ll respond,” he said.
While Knies was willing to acknowledge that he was slow to respond and definitely among the slowest Leafs, he figured Woll was even slower. “If I call him, I might never get a call back,” Knies said. “It’s crazy.”
Woll thought otherwise. “It’s Kniesy with an asterisk,” he said. “If it’s something he’s interested in, that’s important to him. If he’s not interested in it, then him.”
Timmins, seated a couple stalls from Woll, agreed: “(He) will make the plans and then you’ll never hear back from him.”
“I mean, yeah, that’s true,” Knies said.
“Kniesy, you might not hear from him for a couple days,” Timmins said. “You gotta FaceTime him or else you never get a reply.”
For McMann, the choice was clear. “Joe Woll for sure,” McMann said. “He puts his phone away for hours at a time.”
“Ah s–t, I’m probably not great,” said veteran McCabe. “But I’ll say John Tavares. It’s not rudeness. But I’m not great at it either.”
“John Tavares,” Pacioretty said.
“John, for sure,” Reaves added.
“I’ll probably just go with one of the dads,” Marner said in picking Rielly and Tavares.
Tavares didn’t hesitate when asked who was the slowest teammate to respond to messages. “Me,” he said.
Ekman-Larsson has been trying to stay off his phone as much as possible and admitted that he was, well, pretty slow in getting back to his teammates. But Holmberg was even slower, he said.
“I don’t think it’s me,” Tanev said. “(Holmberg) probably.”
“It can be me,” Holmberg said with a grin.
(Photo: Mark Blinch / NHLI via Getty Images)
