Ask a Toronto Maple Leafs fan about Mitch Marner's performance in the 2026 Stanley Cup playoffs for the Vegas Golden Knights and a lot of words will follow, a few of them printable.
Two of the most common ones: "of course."
As in, of course Marner would make his first appearance in the conference finals the minute he's no longer a Maple Leaf. Of course this postseason pariah, this lightning rod of ire through so many disappointing ends in Toronto, would become the playoffs' leading scorer (21 points in 15 games) and the leader for the Conn Smythe Trophy. Of course he's a handful of wins away from following in the tradition of Lanny McDonald, Larry Murphy, Phil Kessel, Tyler Bozak and Nazem Kadri as players who won the Stanley Cup in another city after failing to help Toronto plan their first parade since 1967.
Of course this is happening for Mitch Marner.
"That goes with the territory. It just becomes part of the sport itself: Which ex-Leaf is going to raise the Cup this year, because they couldn't do it here?" said Kevin McGran, a writer for the Toronto Star who attended his first game at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1971.
That it might be Marner's turn has left some fans flustered.
"It's amazing to me listening to grown-ass men, who have families and important jobs, and they're like, 'I can't believe he might win a Stanley Cup. It's just awful,'" said Jeff O'Neill, a former NHL player turned radio and television analyst at TSN in Canada.
Marner spent nine years with the Maple Leafs after they drafted him No. 4 in 2015. The Ontario native amassed 741 points in 657 regular-season games.
Toronto made the playoffs nine times during Marner's tenure. The Leafs advanced past the opening round twice, and never beyond. Marner became the poster boy for that playoff futility, for reasons ranging from his lack of goal production to his performance in elimination games. There were off-ice factors such as his significant salary (six years, $65.408 million) and at times aloof comments, such as when he said that Maple Leafs players are "looked upon as gods here, to be honest" by fans.
"It comes with being one of the highest-paid players on the team. The buck stops with him, so to speak," an NHL player who played in Toronto with Marner told ESPN. "When you have those aspirations as a team, that's always who's going to get the fingers pointed at them when things fall short."
In 2025, Marner was set to become an unrestricted free agent. He chose not to extend with the Maple Leafs, later declaring that it was "time for a new chapter in life." Toronto struck a sign-and-trade deal with the Golden Knights, who landed Marner with an eight-year, $96 million extension.
Marner said hearing constant criticism in Toronto became "a real mental grind" and affected him physically. His agent, Darren Ferris, told the 100% Hockey podcast that fans would litter Marner's yard, while Marner revealed that his home address had been doxxed after the Leafs lost to the Florida Panthers in seven games last postseason. Marner said his family had full-time security for weeks after the playoffs.
"The market's very passionate. They love the team. I was born and raised there. I've been a part of the Leafs Nation for a long time," Marner said. "But when your family's safety comes into question, especially having a new son, I don't think it's acceptable."
After a below-average regular season by his standards (80 points in 81 games), one that saw the winger shift to center out of lineup necessity, Marner has dominated the postseason in a way few that watched him in Toronto could ever conceive. He has been asked about this playoff glow-up throughout the Golden Knights' run, but Marner has refused to get granular about why things are working in Vegas when they didn't in Toronto.
"I feel like I just want to go out there and play my game. I feel like I've been doing that for a while. I know probably people think the results weren't coming in the past. Sometimes that's what happens," Marner said after a hat trick in Game 3 of their series against Anaheim. "I just try to go out there and do the thing I do."
His coach John Tortorella, who took over the Knights with eight games left in the regular season, has been more forthcoming.
"I think he's hell of a hockey player. I think he's very confident in what he brings. People give him s--- all the time about playoffs and this and that. I don't think it bothers him a lick. He just plays," he said.
How is Mitch Marner, Conn Smythe favorite, resonating with those who witnessed his playoff performances in Toronto?
"People are just idiots these days. They seem to have this hatred and vitriol towards Marner," O'Neill said. "But I'd love to see the kid win the Stanley Cup."
THE REACTION IN TORONTO to Marner's run with the Golden Knights seems to fall into three distinct categories:
Those like O'Neill who wouldn't mind seeing Marner lift the Cup
Those, like some of the fans in O'Neill's radio audience, who feel Marner's run with Vegas is another twist of the knife in their backs
Fans of schadenfreude that see Marner's success as another chance to take a shot at the Leafs
"I know there have been people out there that seem to want to make this a negative story for Leafs fans. Like, maybe this is the comeuppance for this terrible fan base that drove this poor innocent kid out of town," said Sean McIndoe, who founded the Leafs-centric blog Down Goes Brown before joining The Athletic. "But it was nine years. The reality is it was never going to happen for him in Toronto."
Marner's journey in Toronto started with hope and ended with despair. He represented a new dawn for the woebegone franchise when he was drafted fourth overall in 2015 -- their highest draft pick since 1989, and one season before Auston Matthews would arrive with the No. 1 pick. Matthews was a hockey prodigy from Arizona. Marner grew up a Leafs fan in Markham, Ontario. That meant something.
"This should have been the slam dunk story of all time. Local kid gets drafted by the Maple Leafs. It's not just a local kid, but one that grew up wearing Doug Gilmour's number," McIndoe said. "This kid is going to run this town. That he's the next one we all latch on to."
Marner's nine seasons in Toronto saw him finish with the third best points-per-game average (1.13 in 657 games) in the Original Six franchise's history ... in the regular season. That average dropped to 0.90 points per game in his 77 playoff appearances, which was still the fourth-best average in team history (minimum 50 games) but helped form perceptions that he wasn't the same player after Game 82.
Marner had a stretch of 18 playoff games from 2019 to 2021 in which he didn't score a goal, spanning three first-round exits. His lack of production in Games 6 and 7 over multiple seasons was notorious: six points in 15 games, with one goal.
Everyone has a playoff moment they believe turned Marner into a target. For McGran, it was Game 7 against the Boston Bruins in 2024, when David Pastrnak slipped behind Marner in the neutral zone to score the series-winner in overtime.
"That was the moment when I was like, OK, Mitch is in trouble because people up here are smart enough to know that he should have been skating [harder]. And in this city, as you're probably aware, we do like to eat our own," he said. "If you could scapegoat a guy, Mitch skated into it, I think on that play."
Marner became synonymous with playoff failure, for fans and media. TNT analyst and former NHL player Paul Bissonnette was a vocal critic, tweeting that Marner should "get off the ice" and calling him "pathetic" -- among other things -- during the 2024 playoffs. (He has since apologized to Marner.)
There also were missteps from Marner off the ice.
"When it first started, there was a lot of hope, but then things in this market really started to sour," said Nick Alberga, who hosts the daily Leafs Morning Take program. "When I look back at his time at Toronto, he's no doubt a superstar player. It was more off the ice in terms of why people are sour on the player."
Frequently, it was those around Marner who were muddying the waters for him in Toronto. Alberga was a radio host for Sportsnet and said Marner's father, Paul, would call local radio stations "because he wasn't happy with the narrative around his son's contract negotiations." Paul Marner publicly lobbied reporters for his son to be captain of the Maple Leafs in 2018.
Getting a critical response from someone in Marner's orbit was not uncommon. His security detail would frequently comment on posts from reporters and send direct messages. That included the popular podcaster Steve Dangle, whose access to Marner was threatened by his head of security in a direct message in 2021. Dangle declined to be interviewed for this story.
But Marner also had a contentious contract negotiation in 2019 with general manager Kyle Dubas as a restricted free agent. Marner's camp ignored the salary of any comparable wingers to focus on what Matthews signed for earlier that year ($11.634 million AAV). There were leaks to reporters from both sides of the table. Dubas went as far as to say that if Marner signed a free-agent offer sheet with another club, there was no guarantee Toronto would match it.
In the end, Marner signed a six-year deal with a $10.893 million AAV, the second-largest cap hit among NHL wingers at the time. That contract carried a no-movement clause in the last two seasons, which allowed Marner to nix a trade to the Carolina Hurricanes in his final season with Toronto.
"They weren't taking a hometown discount. I just hope somebody sat him down and said, 'This is going to have an impact on how you're perceived. And if you want to be loved as bad as you seem to want to be loved here, have you given any thought to what's going to happen?'" McIndoe said.
"Now he's no longer the fun local kid story. He's the fun local kid who's also got a contract that nobody else who plays his position has, and the expectations that come with that."
He couldn't meet those expectations with the Maple Leafs. He's surpassing them with Vegas. And everyone in Toronto has a theory for why this is happening.
FOR ONE OF Marner's former teammates, it all comes down to fit.
"I'm really happy for him. He cares. He wants to be a difference-maker. Is he doing anything differently? Or are things maybe a better fit for where he is now?" he asked. "This is always a topic I'll talk about with guys. It's a tough thing to quantify. You could have seemingly similar players on different teams, but for whatever reason, the fit just works a little bit differently."
O'Neill says he believes the anonymity of a passionate but non-invasive hockey market is important.
"He seems much more relaxed. When he talks, just his shoulders are kind of down and he's relaxed," he said. "He's able to just be himself. He gets in the car and goes to a gas station on the way home and nobody bothers him. Life is grand."
Mitch Marner lights the lamp for Golden Knights.
On the ice, O'Neill says he believes Marner is relieved to be "a part of the puzzle" rather than the whole picture.
"In big games and big moments [in Toronto], him and Auston Matthews didn't have their best performances. Now there's so many good players around him that it doesn't have to be Mitch or Auston or no success," he said. "Because in Vegas, if it's not Mitch, it can be Mark Stone or Jack Eichel or Pavel Dorofeyev or Shea Theodore. I think that's the biggest factor: There's so many other quality players around their team in Vegas."
This is perhaps the most popular theory: Marner went from a culture seeking success to a culture of success, and thus a weight was lifted from him.
"The biggest culture is winning. If you've got a bunch of guys on your roster that won a Stanley Cup and know what it's like to go through the wars, that's the biggest culture of all time. It's there in Vegas," said O'Neill, who played 821 career games with the Whalers, Hurricanes and Leafs.
"Sometimes when guys have never won and all they've done is struggled, it's just like the blind leading the blind where it's like, who really knows what to say in here or what to do or how to lead the charge. Those guys in Vegas certainly know how to do that, because they've done it."
Mark Stone tallies goal for Vegas Golden Knights on the power play
Marner is now five wins away from being a champion himself. If that happens, he'll finally have a chance to bring the Stanley Cup back to Toronto ... just not in the way fans there were envisioning.
There was a hint to how Maple Leafs fans will ultimately feel about Marner back in January, when Marner returned to Toronto as a Golden Knight. Yes, they booed him lustfully whenever he touched the puck and held up signs that read "Benedict Marn-old." But they also gave him a heartfelt standing ovation during a video tribute.
Alberga likens it to Vince Carter leaving the Toronto Raptors in 2004. "I understand that it changed the perspective when the Raptors won the championship in 2019. But Carter left sort of the same way that Mitch left, and we welcomed him back one day. We retired his jersey. So it'll happen one day for Mitch, I think," he said.
McIndoe says he believes that Marner's return to the Maple Leafs won't be for a number retirement ceremony, but as an active NHL player.
"I think Mitch Marner finishes his career as a Leaf. Probably on a discount contract. Maybe with a Stanley Cup ring or two. He becomes the veteran leader they need," McIndoe said.
The notion that Marner could be the one to finally bring a winning playoff culture to Toronto was previously inconceivable. But then again, so was Mitch Marner, playoff MVP.