Posted this on reddit the other day.
I swear up and down Marner's problem isn't that he doesn't care. I think he cares way, way too much. He is a Leafs fan, so every single ounce of the trauma that we feel about Game 7's, he feels. Then there's the fact that he's lived those disappointments. Then there's the fact that he has the residual guilt of raking his team over the coals for every penny. And then there's the fact that his contract literally has 93 in it, this guy wants to be a franchise legend more than anything else in the world and carries that with him every shift in the playoffs.
He sucked ass in the playoffs this year, but nothing about his body language or facial expressions told me that he didn't care. The pure frustration and dejection that was constantly on his face and in his shoulders showed me a guy who is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, but does not have anywhere near the kind of capacity for that. Let me be 100% clear that I have zero sympathy for him here. These are all problems of his own making. The contract and his ego are what did this to him. But funnily enough, while I think OP is correct in that fixing Marner is better than trading him, I think figuring out how to get him to chill the f*** out a little bit is the way to go.
Mitch is dynamite when he's relaxed. When he's got swagger. He doesn't need to ratchet the pressure up and care even more, he needs to calm down and play hockey. Unfortunately, I think that's why a trade is the best case for him, because I doubt you can really just get him to forget all of the shit that he's put himself through here. How do you tell a guy to forget those Doug Gilmour dreams and just be Mitch Marner? If he goes somewhere else that happens pretty much automatically.
If I could push a button and fix Marner to make him a playoff beast, I'd push that button instead of trading him 10/10 times. I think it's next to impossible that we find a good trade. How do you trade the 4th highest scorer in the league and not get put over the barrel? Fixing him is the way to go. But I really don't think it's that simple, or even in the direction that most people assume that it is.
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So it's a bit of a relief to hear Dubas say that he won't trade Marner. But the real question is how to we fix this guy mentally. He scored 9 points in 7 games against the big bad Bruins as a sophomore. The talent is in there. It's almost completely unbelievable that of all the young stars in the league we got the one who is a dud in the playoffs. Marner will figure it out eventually, so how do the Leafs help him do that when the pressure is going to be EVEN BIGGER on him next year. Failure was already not an option, the pressure on him is going to be astronomical now that he's going to have to justify his existence to us every time he steps on the ice and triple that in the playoffs. He was total ass last year after he signed his contract, I'm afraid that we're going to be headed for another year of that. While I don't believe that he'll be a playoff dud, unfortunately all of this pressure that he's created for himself has turned him into a bit of a headcase that effects his performance.
