Leafs Nation: Phil Kessel Doesn't Deserve Your Boos

There will be boos at Air Canada Centre this Saturday night. It won't have anything to do with Halloween, though. In one of the most anticipated returns of any Toronto athlete, probably since Vince Carter, those boos will be directed at Phil Kessel, the enigmatic former Leaf who is set to play his first game back in the city since being dealt to the Pittsburgh Penguins. But Kessel does not deserve those boos. All he did during his six seasons with the Maple Leafs was deliver exactly what he could realistically be expected to produce.

In his first five seasons in Toronto, Kessel scored at a 30-goal pace. (He notched 20 goals in the lockout-shortened, 48-game season which prorated to 34 goals over an 82-game schedule.) Once he made his Leafs debut, 12 games into the 2009-10 season after recovering from offseason shoulder surgery, he never again missed another contest. Few players in the league were as durable as Kessel over the six-year span he wore the Maple Leafs uniform.

In the playoffs, the one time the Leafs made it that far, Kessel delivered as well, putting up four goals and six points in seven games. Therein lies the problem, though. The expectations for Kessel were never realistic, never reasonable. They were stacked against him before he even pulled on the Maple Leafs jersey.

At the time of his acquisition, Toronto was just a year removed from Mats Sundin's brilliant 13-year run of dominance. The Leafs were looking for a new franchise-type player to lead them, and that was problem No. 1 for Kessel. He was miscast from the beginning. From a talent standpoint, sure, Kessel and Sundin are in the same ballpark but that's where the comparisons end. Sundin was a natural leader, a figure comfortable in being the voice of the team on a daily basis. Kessel wanted no part of that role, not because he wanted to abdicate responsibility, but simply because he wasn't comfortable doing it. Some people can handle that responsibility, while others don't have it in their DNA. For fans who expected Kessel to seamlessly take that torch from Sundin and run with it, he was already a disappointment in their eyes, though through no fault of his own.

Kessel was good in his first season in Toronto, meeting expectations by notching 30 goals in 70 games. But the Leafs were not good that year. They were so bad, in fact, that they would have ended up with the second overall pick in the 2010 draft had they not included it in the deal to acquire Kessel. They could have ended up with Tyler Seguin, a generational talent to build around for years to come. Instead, the Boston Bruins got him. Seguin and the Bruins would win a Stanley Cup in his rookie season.

The next season, Kessel again was good (32 goals), the Leafs again were not, winding up with the ninth overall pick which was ceded to the Bruins. Boston ended up with Dougie Hamilton, a young, top-tier defenceman. As a result, Kessel constantly had to put up with the comparisons to Seguin and Hamilton, another battle that was nearly impossible for him to win. Leafs general manager Brian Burke, in dealing two consecutive first-round picks to the Bruins for Kessel, had bet on his team being much better than it turned out to be. Kessel did his part. The rest of the team just wasn't very good, and one player can only do so much.

Through four seasons with the Leafs, Kessel scored 119 times in 282 games, a pace of .42 goals per game. Only six players (Steven Stamkos, Alex Ovechkin, Corey Perry, Patrick Marleau, Jarome Iginla and Ilya Kovalchuk) scored more often than Kessel between 2009-13. But at just 26 years old and heading toward unrestricted free agency at the end of the 2013-14 season, the Leafs would have to pony up financially to keep him around. So they did, rewarding him with an eight-year, $64 million deal.

Was that the right decision? Contracts of that length are a gamble at the best of times, especially when given to players who are not cornerstone pieces and who cannot be a team's best player if that club has any hope of winning anything. Kessel is a complementary piece on a good team, ideally paid an average annual salary in the $6.5-million range. But with goal scoring at a premium, the Leafs were between a rock and a hard place. Let Kessel walk in free agency and he would have received similar money elsewhere from another organization. That team likely would have regretted it, too, but the fact is that was more or less the going rate for a player capable of Kessel's level of production. So the Leafs decided to bite the bullet and overpay.

Before you fault Kessel for being the owner of a burdensome contract, though, ask yourself this: If your employer came to you and offered you more money than you were worth, would you say, "Ah thanks, but that's too much for what my role is. Give me a little less." Didn't think so, you'd be a fool to do that. So Kessel took the deal and promptly delivered a career-high 37 goals in the season after signing the contract. It was the season before that deal would kick in financially, but the heightened expectations for Kessel kicked in immediately.

The shy native from Madison, Wisconsin, was now trying to live up to the legacy of Sundin, the comparisons to Seguin and Hamilton, and a contract that in the eyes of many left him overpaid. Go get 'em Phil, no pressure! Those were the expectations he was faced with, none of them through any fault of his own. Those could never be met. Realistic expectations were for him to come to Toronto and be a consistent 30-plus goal scorer. He met those with flying colours.

So before you boo Kessel on Saturday in his return to Toronto for the first time, remember to think: Did Kessel fail in Toronto? Or did he really even ever have a chance to succeed?