Mitch Marner has another gear in him. The Maple Leafs need him to find it

It wasn’t quite a beard, but there was a whole bunch of scruff — blonde-looking scruff, but scruff no less — dotting Mitch Marner’s face early this fall.

He looked grown up.

And indeed, Marner is no kid anymore. He’s no longer one of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ younger players. At 26, he’s closer in age to newcomer Tyler Bertuzzi (28) than rookie Matthew Knies (20). Marner has played in more than 500 NHL games and might well end the coming season as the sixth-leading scorer in Leafs history (he needs 87 points). He got married this summer, though he says that’s done nothing to deter his video game habit.

“My wife loves when I go play video games,” Marner told The Athletic on a sunny day in September. “She gets three hours by herself upstairs to watch whatever TV show she wants and gets some serious one-on-one time with (our dog) Zeus. Nothing’s changed with married life at all, other than obviously the ring and now I just have a fidget spinner on my finger that I play with every once in a while. Nothing’s changed.

“I’m a very lucky guy.”

Marner has long been one of the NHL’s better players, better in the regular season anyway than he arguably gets credit for. And yet, it’s at this point in his career, when he’s fully grown and smack in the middle of his prime, playoff disappointments piling up behind him, that the Leafs need him to reach another level still.

Whether he gets there or not may just determine whether the Leafs finally make a serious challenge for the Stanley Cup — or fall short yet again.

At the end of last season, after the Leafs were ousted in the second round in supremely disappointing fashion, Marner was asked for the first time in his NHL career about the possibility of being traded in what loomed as a franchise-changing offseason.

Marner admits it was an anxious summer for him on the professional front, his future with the Leafs uncertain for the first time. “But at the same time, that’s not my job to worry about it,” he said. “My job is to worry about what I’m doing in the gym, on the ice, and worrying about how I can just be the best self I can be when I come here.”

It turned out to be a franchise-changing offseason, just not in the way that was expected. Kyle Dubas was fired, suddenly, as Leafs GM by team president Brendan Shanahan, and Brad Treliving was hired as his replacement.

Treliving called Marner soon after and outlined his plans for the roster.

“He made it pretty clear that he wanted to keep our core together and he trusted our core,” Marner said. “That’s reassuring to hear for sure.”

Marner put together the most productive playoffs of his career with 14 points in 11 games last spring, but overall his performance still fell shy of his electric regular-season standards. Six of those 14 points came in Games 1 and 2 against the Lightning, both blowouts. Marner notched only one assist in Games 1-3 of the second round, all losses. Like the Leafs’ other stars, his performance in the biggest games has fallen short of expectations.

With the exception of 2018, when he tallied nine points in seven first-round games as a 20-year-old, the playoffs have been the sticking point of Marner’s career — and a crucial reason the Leafs have won only a single round in his tenure.

That has undoubtedly overshadowed just how spectacular a performer he’s been in the regular season.

Consider this: Over the last three regular seasons, Marner delivered more total value (accounting for both offence and defence) to his team than all but four players, according to The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn’s model. Those four players: Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews, Matthew Tkachuk and Cale Makar.

Four players. That’s it.

And yet, Marner has never grabbed even a top-10 finish in Hart Trophy voting. Last season was his highest finish yet: 13th.

On some level, it’s understandable. Marner has spent those seasons (and all the others) as Robin to Auston Matthews’ Batman. Matthews was the runner-up for MVP in 2021 and won the award in 2022. And so while Marner has been great, Matthews has mostly been greater. That shouldn’t take away from what Marner has accomplished in the regular season, as a force on both ends, in the way that it has.

It’s what will inevitably vault Marner even higher on the list of the NHL’s highest-paid players. Marner’s $10.9 million cap hit ranks ninth among NHLers this season. His next deal, which he’s eligible to sign next July 1, might well exceed the $11.25 million cap hit that David Pastrnak got on his eight-year extension with the Bruins last March, and may even start with a 12. (Will he seek term similar to Matthews’ recent four-year extension?)

Whether the Leafs are the team to give him that contract may well depend on what goes down next spring.

Marner may just be the swing piece that determines whether the Leafs finally go on a deep playoff run. The gap between his regular-season and playoff performance has arguably been wider than Matthews’ or William Nylander’s. And while John Tavares’ drop-off from regular season to playoffs has been steeper than Marner’s, expectations aren’t nearly as high for him, especially as he enters his age-33 season.

The Leafs haven’t seen Marner at his apex when it matters most. That apex may still be expanding.

Asked if he’d reached his ceiling yet, Marner responded, “No, I think all of us haven’t. I think we can all get better.”

“Nothing would surprise me,” said Morgan Rielly, when asked if there was still another level for Marner to get to. “He’s a superstar. He’s a top player in the league, one of the best passers. So, he’s already at an extremely high point. But if he goes to a new level and adds more to his game — I don’t know what that would be, but if that happens, I won’t be surprised by that. He’s capable of just about anything he wants to do. With his skill and his IQ, I think he can keep growing until he stops playing.”

Marner will become a 100-point man at some point, perhaps even this season. (He finished with 99 points last season and 97 in 72 games the year before.) Maybe his first 100-point season will come from a spike in production on a power play that will use Marner a little differently this season. With Guy Boucher at the controls, the Leafs plan to have Marner start power plays down by the goal line in the left corner of the ice, at least initially. Marner and Nylander, operating on the left flank, will often trade spots, but it’s from deep in the corner that Marner can put opposing penalty kills on edge.

From there, he can play QB, with a path to move the puck to each of his four teammates. The way Marner sees it, penalty-killers will have a hard time seeing what’s behind them when the puck comes his way. “That’s when,” he says, “the guys that we have on our power play can really do a great job of sneaking around and trying to put themselves in quiet spots on the ice. From my point of view, it’s just gotta be trying to make the right play and try not to force too many things through the middle and cause havoc around the net.”

The strategy could put the puck in his hands more often.

Marner’s 36 power-play points last season, a career high, were tied for 10th in the league. (McDavid was tops with 71, followed by Draisaitl with 62.) He had only eight primary assists, a number that should rise this year.

Marner has been on the Leafs’ No. 1 penalty-killing unit for the last four seasons. But with Matthews joining the PK for the first time in earnest this year, Marner will slide, at least initially, into more of a secondary role, one that sees him out there with Matthews. (Calle Järnkrok will join David Kämpf on the No. 1 unit.)

Buzzing around with relentless energy and a prowling stick, Marner has always been a problem for opposing power plays. His 24 short-handed shots last season were second-most in the NHL. Drop Matthews in for some of those opportunities and Marner may create even more offence than the five short-handed points he managed last season.

Marner’s biggest area for growth might just be as a scorer.

He had arguably the best stretch of his career in the second half of the 2021-22 season, when he tied for the league lead with 76 points in 46 games from Jan. 15 onward. He trailed only Matthews, Kirill Kaprizov and Elias Lindholm with 29 goals.

Marner returned from a shoulder injury in January determined to shoot. He played like he was tired of talking about shooting it more and just did it instead. He finished the year with a career-best 35 goals in only 72 games, a 40-goal pace.

But then that shoot-first (or sometimes first) approach faded last season, particularly at five-on-five. In fact, Marner finished with the lowest shot rate of his career in that space — just six shots per 60 minutes, a mark that ranked 181st among NHL forwards who logged at least 800 minutes, just behind guys like Sam Lafferty and Noel Acciari.

Marner shot it a bit more in the playoffs, but not with the same intention as that 2022 run and not from zones that were likely to yield rewards, as you can see from his shot chart.

Marner has scored only 10 times in 50 playoff games and only once on the power play.

If he can tip the scales slightly toward shooting from what’s probably an 80-20 pass-shoot equation at the moment, Marner will become more difficult to defend. More unpredictable, certainly, for defending opponents who have to wonder if he might just rip it.

As the numbers from that scorching run two seasons ago suggest, that could make for an even more dangerous version of Matthews; he scored 36 times in 41 games during the run.

Rielly thinks it’s a “mindset” thing. “If you’re not in that state of mind where you want to score, you want to put pucks on net, you want to get more shots,” he said, “you tend to defer to passes.”

Mentality seems like a critical part of the wider puzzle for Marner. Tightness and tension have mostly defined those playoff performances. He’s not often played with the swagger of what he really is: One of the very best players in the world.

Unlock that, coupled with all the other stuff, and Marner might finally reach the fullness of his awesome potential — and ditch the playoff failures of the past for good, leading or co-leading the Leafs where they haven’t gone in a long, long while.

“You always gotta live in the moment,” Marner says. “I think that’s something I always try to embrace and talk about a lot is living in the moment, living in the here and now and not focusing on the past or the future. You should just live in the present now and realize what’s going on and just be thankful for what you have.”

(Top photo: Kevin Sousa / NHLI via Getty Images)

Stats and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference and Cap Friendly