The Leafs finally won a playoff round. Who cares? You should, and here’s why

It finally happened. The drought is over. After 19 agonizingly long years, the Toronto Maple Leafs have finally won a playoff round.

Great. Who cares?

Well, I do – maybe a little too much, as my neighbors can probably tell you. (Sorry guys, that baby will get back to sleep eventually.) Every Leaf fan does, and as you may be aware, there are a lot of us.

But what about everyone else?

After all, I know what some of you are saying: Wow, a team won one round of the playoffs. Newsflash, eight teams do that every year, and the rumor is that some teams have been known to win even more than that. Some keep winning until they get some sort of big silver trophy. (Note to self: Research what it’s called.) Every team in the league has won at least one round in the cap era, with the exception of two-year-old Seattle, and they might do it tomorrow.

So sure, the slowest kid in the class finally crossed the finish line after getting lapped by everyone else. Is this really a big deal?

Well… yeah. It does matter, for more than a few reasons. If you’re a Leaf fan, you shouldn’t be reading this – go do whatever it is you do to celebrate a big win. (Checks with a grandparent if you can’t remember.) If you’re one of those anti-Leaf weirdos, go cry in a comment section like you usually do. But if you’re truly neutral and want to know why this would matter, read on, because I’ve got five reasons for you.

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The 2023 Old Guy Without a Cup rankings

It’s getting late in the first round. Do you know where your OGWAC is?

Probably at home, rubbing Ben Gay all over their body and making weird noises when they try to get out of a chair. That’s good. That’s what we want.

For those of you who are new to this, an OGWAC is that most cherished of playoff tropes: The Old Guy Without a Cup. He’s been around a while, or maybe forever, but despite some agonizing near-misses he’s never been able to get this ring. Now he’s running out of time, and it’s almost impossible not to cheer him on. And when an OGWAC does finally win, the Cup handoff is often epic.

Think Ray Bourque in 2001, which is basically the platonic ideal of an OGWAC story. There was also Teemu Selanne in 2007, and Lanny McDonald in 1989. Last year, Erik Johnson got the first handoff from Gabriel Landeskog after 14 seasons and over a decade in Colorado. It was pretty great.

Every year, I like to check in on the OGWACs. We’ll do this as a ranking, but this is really about celebrating each guy.

The rules: We consider a guy “old” if he’s been in the league for a decade or more and is at least 33 by the time the final ends, but the older the better. Ideally we want players on legitimate contenders, since they have a better chance of winning. We also prefer guys that are healthy and playing a regular role, since an OGWAC in a suit is always just kind of a bummer. And we give bonus points for near-misses, overcoming adversity, and just generally being an easy-to-root-for story.

It's been a tough year for the OGWAC community, as we had to say goodbye to our patron saint, Joe Thornton. His exit from the league after 24 seasons was a reminder that there’s no guarantee of a happy ending on these stories, which should make the chase all the more poignant for those that remain. Let’s count down a top 20.

20. Brad Hunt, Avalanche

We always want to cover as many teams as possible, so we’ll find room for Hunt, our only option on an Avalanche team where almost everyone else has rings from last year. The 34-year-old Hunt doesn’t, so he should be hungry when he gets into the lineup. If he does.

19. Jaroslav Halak, Rangers

I never really know what to do with goalies, let alone backup goalies. If you’re not a Rangers fan, it’s possible you’re just now finding out who their backup even is, and it’s hard to imagine a scenario where they win the Cup without Igor Shesterkin playing just about every minutes. Still, Halak is in his 17th season, and he gave the team 24 starts this year, so it’s not like he’s riding coattails. Now on his seventh team, he single-handedly dragged the Habs to the conference final in 2010 and was one game away from a ring with the Bruins in 2019, so he’s earned a spot on our list.

18. Brendan Smith, Devils

He’s 34, he’s in his 12th season, and is on his fourth team. Could you pick him out of a lineup? Maybe not, but he’s oldest guy on a very young team. He’s also a defensive defenseman who didn’t have a goal all year, and you know what team means: He’s scoring at some point this postseason. (Assuming he gets back into the lineup first.)

17. Wayne Simmonds, Maple Leafs

We haven’t seen Simmonds yet in the first round, and it’s possible we won’t at all. That hurts his case, but the 15-year veteran is still the sort of heart-and-soul guy that can turn into a great story if he manages to crack the lineup. And unlike most of the names on this list, it feels like this run might be it for the 34-year-old Simmonds, who’s on his sixth and maybe final team.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Sweet 16

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- We talk Leafs/Lightning heading into Game 5
- The Kraken push the Avs to the edge
- Granger on Jets/Knights
- The odds on all the 3-2 series
- History, listener mail, Swiss Chalet vs. St. Hubert, and more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)

Puck Soup: Sean DOES NOT take a victory lap

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Nothing but playoff talk
- We discuss all eight matchups
- Including the Leafs series
- Which is not over

>> Listen on The Athletic
>> Subscribe on iTunes
>> Listen on Spotify

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Remembering your team’s greatest playoff run (that didn’t end with a Stanley Cup)

It’s the playoffs, that wonderful time of year when 16 teams battle it out for the right to lift the Stanley Cup.

Spoiler alert: Most of them will fail. Fifteen of them, to be exact.

In fact, they’ll fail miserably. At least, that’s the narrative we’ve apparently all agreed on when it comes to the playoffs. One winner, and fifteen failures. The playoffs are all about winning the Stanley Cup, and it doesn’t matter how good your season was or even how much you win when you get to the playoffs. If you don’t win it all, you’ve failed, and you should be sad about that. We don’t do participation trophies in this sport, and we don’t celebrate losers. Only one team and one fan base gets to be happy.

Well, screw that. I hate this narrative. And sure, maybe it’s because I’m a Leafs fan and my team never wins anything. But it’s a miserable way to go through life as a sports fan, especially in an era with 32 teams. Welcome to NHL fandom, you have a 97% chance of being miserable at the end of every season, doesn’t that sound like fun?

Obviously, some teams are bad and some seasons really do end in crushing disappointment. Maybe even most of them. But at some point, too many of us lost sight of the fact that being a fan is supposed to be fun, and that means being allowed to enjoy and even celebrate seasons that don’t end in a championship.

So today, as we gear up for another night of postseason action, that’s what we’re going to do. Let’s go through all 32 teams and remember one playoff run that was legitimately fun, even if it didn’t end in a Stanley Cup championship. Bonus points if they only won a round or two. And we’re going to be relentlessly positive about it, which will admittedly be a change from my normal tone. I promise I’ll be back to complaining about how much I hate everything soon.

Until then, let’s remember some teams that didn’t win, but did win us over. As a bonus, if you think I picked the wrong year for your favorite team, hop into the comments and let me know which season was even better.

We’re all about the good times here. No rankings, no countdown, no alphabetical order, let’s just remember some playoff runs.

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