The Steve Dangle Podcast - All Or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs Fan Reaction | Episode 4

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Steve Dangle, Adam Wylde, & Jesse Blake react to episode 4 of Amazon Original, All Or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs. Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/PJbWmi5FjI4 Get a behind-the-scenes look at the 2020-2021 @NHL season with All or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs, on Prime Video  Get More Prime Video: Stream Now: http://bit.ly/WatchMorePrimeVideo Facebook: http://bit.ly/PrimeVideoFB Twitter: http://bit.ly/PrimeVideoTW Instagram: http://bit.ly/AmazonPrimeVideoIG All Or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs – Official Trailer | Prime Video https://youtu.be/VQXqcILCMPw Visit https://sdpn.ca for merch and more. We've joined The Athletic and you can too! Hit the link to subscribe: https://theathletic.com/sdp Follow us on Twitter:@Steve_Dangle, @AdamWylde, & @JesseBlake Follow us on Instagram:@SteveDangle, @AdamWylde, & @Jesse.Blake Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

the steve dangle podcast with your host steve dangle adam wild and jesse blake episode four or five of aon lfr aon fr tty lbrb terrible all or nothing fan reaction and we're the fans so are you and this is episode four we got one more episode coming out tomorrow obviously you probably will have wanted to watch episode four of all or nothing before you see this but hey you might want to listen us first maybe listen if you want us to ruin it and then you consume it do it do it i say do it now when i went into this episode the thing i was thinking was okay this is the episode before it gets painful wow i was like i'm like this is the episode this this is probably the last episode

where i'm gonna watch and not wince at the whole thing and not gnash my teeth and you know when i sometimes when i get really frustrated i'll grab my i'll grab my thumbs and i tuck them under my fingers and just this is my this is my like the last hurrah exciting how great was this season episode because it really was a great season it was but to me uh i knew i knew the final two episodes it was going to be a two-parter disaster i i didn't think this was before the pain i'm like nope this is the beginning of the pain this is where it starts everything post deadline you're just setting up the disaster movie right and what i was very curious about um because you'll remember we talked about this when we found out this documentary was happening

or well we we've known for a while but when we found out how the season ended i said i would dedicate i think what i said was i would dedicate the entire last episode to just the playoffs which they haven't touched the playoffs yet by the end of this episode so let's talk about this episode no no but they're setting it all up right right right and i'm genuinely angry with the people who made this for how much they made me like nick felino yeah no kidding isn't he great the leaf that wasn't oh the greatest leaf that wasn't yeah and And really, it all starts off great. He shows up, and they talk about his dad,

and they show the highlights of his dad scoring and jumping because he was jumping like Foligno. That was his nickname. Chirping the Sioux, the second Dubas walks in the room. When he's FaceTiming his dad, and his dad's like, Wendell texted me today. He said, it's good to see you're the 71 back. And I was like, ah!

He's as excited as Wendell texted him. It's like, we would, you know? And they talk about the hat, which we loved. He's like, you got a Leafs hat hanging around the house somewhere? and he does like i know where it is oh and and and you know you get you understand why a guy like felino uh uh nick felino was a captain yeah 100 yep like you see it written all over his forehead that is a captain that is a leader and he's great he just seems like a great guy and exactly exactly what the team needed like dubas is forever gonna take crap for that trade the

the not getting taylor hall i think the yeah nick felino might as well be called not taylor hall yeah yeah like for all eternity in this fan base right and now their teammates i forgot about that their teammates boston is so unfair there it's oh it's just nauseating um but when felino walks in the room when he makes his introduction when he's letting all his teammates get to know him as a person he's going around the room so confidently he exudes leadership like he said i think he had four points in his first three games something like that with the leafs yeah we forget that he was he was good and and the hard no style that he played that we didn't even really get to see because there just wasn't time everything about

that trade that will forever go down in infamy but everything about that trade when it was made when they acquired this player who they assumed was healthy and i guess we should we should assume he was and got hurt it was the right move to get him it was the right move to get him now should they have spent that on taylor hall instead well price point might have been wrong but the player was right he was what the team needed and the right mix too yeah a little bit of confidence a little bit of experience right mix of guys right style of play he knocked off this team the year before yes who knows what the leafs lack more than the guy who beat them steve i wrote genuinely yeah i wrote down a specific question for you okay watching this episode okay i'm gonna

i'm just gonna look at my notes and and read it right to you luckily i can't read it how many times have you done nothing and injured your back like felino oh i wrote that's the i've never actually been doing anything and heard it because he was just kind of skating i heard it playing literally i'm not making this up i threw my back out once or whatever you call it had a had like a and uh an attack in one of my discs once while i was in high school i was a teenager when this happened while i was playing starcraft like sitting down i was sitting in my chair and my back just went get on the floor and i went holy shit okay and it's but it's everything that happened leading up to that so being an nhl player made nick felino hurt his back it was

you know it's a lot of when you think about it it's a horrible sport for your back it's a crazy amount of movement um and then sitting crazy amount of movement sitting crazy amount of movement sitting and your legs are tight and let's not forget if a guy with who plays felino style is taking cross checks to the back cross checks to the back and you're slunt you're slouched over the whole time there's no scenario really for your uh hip flexors to actually extend right fully stretched and your back freaks out in those situations and that's just muscular like who god knows what's happening to his discs when your back's out yeah what can you do shit nothing can you pick up your son no and he's 25 pounds maybe yeah when we we talked uh i don't remember

which episode we talked about um how oh it was a few podcasts ago when we were talking about jonathan drew and his insomnia and lack of sleep and we were talking about um how impossible it is to recover when you're not sleeping um i was like changing leo and feeding him when he was a like a still an infant from my knees for like a month it's you can't do anything with with a bad back and this guy came back he hurt himself and then came back and played in the playoffs and fought cory perry and none of which we've seen by the way but when he was helped off the ice and you just see him not being able to put any remember we're at the lindros tournament and Someone on our team hurt their back?

Yeah. And how we – your legs stop working because the thing that connects the legs to the rest of your body is hurt. Yeah. It's – I don't know how guys return from back injuries. When I was all for re-signing Jake Gardner and then we learn, oh, it's his back. I went, no, we're done there. And I wanted Foligno back for emotional reasons.

Yeah, because you would want him to take a second stab at this, right? Yeah. feels like he got robbed but it does feel like he got robbed but oh boy i'm fascinated to see how he does as a bruin oh i'm i'm sure i'm sure he'll throw at his back hoisting the cup yeah his family though he like his mom and dad they really it seemed cherished the the what and they had 15 games he got as a lead they had wendell over to watch the game you have wendell there and then he's like drive safe wendell and when he's and and so here's the other thing um so you see that injury then at the beginning and we've skipped over something really important guys

we skipped over zach bogosian zach bogosian whose family's in florida and he hasn't seen them for months and they're like are you coming home soon and he's like not really like imagine telling your six-year-old that and and then you go into the injury so i guess we'll talk about the separation from the family first yeah well so the way he left town the way we talked about it as a fan base was wrong it was wrong um and i feel like i i remember i took some grief online for i can't remember what reason we were talking about bogosian leaving and the leafs weren't able to keep him covid protocols was the twitter rumor covid protocols and it made him seem like a it almost made him seem like a conspiracy theory it was the wrong narrative yeah i don't know what

he does or doesn't believe in that regard i don't i have no idea but it's not protocols it's getting his family across the border covid protocols also includes hey i can't go to my daughter's birthday party yes and that's so hard and i and i think back to all the examples that we've seen um mike mckenna the goalie who was claimed off waivers like by four different teams or something and like at some point he just tapped out he's like i can't keep doing this to my daughter right like i can't keep doing this to my family and when bogosian signed with the leafs truly he probably didn't think that we'd be in a lockdown exactly or in a lockdown that long and that people couldn't travel and all that yeah like we we would have thought okay it's it's bad

and it's coming back but i don't think anybody especially in this part of the world again And, you know, us being local Torontonians, we were locked down forever. It was a long, long, long slog. And you saw Robin Leonard complaining about it. And he's in Vegas. Yeah. Where they could do stuff. So, like, can you imagine?

Yeah. And he, literally, Zach Bogosian, cannot cross the border to physically see his family for months and months and months. Yeah, I get it. I feel bad for all the guys who got to be Leafs and never got to enjoy the fruits of it. Yeah. Well, like Joe Thornton never got to play in front of a full arena as a Leaf. it's it's a travesty yeah travesty yep and and zach bogosian as well who wanted to be here the season before and so then and then they show him taking a just an odd skate sometimes take an odd

edge and he goes face first into the boards what an animal he is though that's the one where he got back up right yeah just kept going that was the one where we all thought oh snapped ankle he's and then he gets up we're like what the what all right and he we knew about the shoulder yeah we did know about the shoulder i remember it being a surprise in the moment but we did know about the shoulder i didn't know about the laceration in his face all these hockey players yeah there's no no hockey player um retires with a perfect face you go home to your partner and you and they go where did you get that like what what yeah and they probably don't even remember don't even know no idea two and five canadians will hear the words you have cancer that's why

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bogosian there this was the only moment i could get my girlfriend to watch uh this doc because she doesn't care about hockey at all she's armenian and in the in the doc they have a little thing about zach bogosian being armenian and i had no idea i didn't know either yeah because usually uh names that end in ian their armenian descent but you'd say uh zach bogosian you'd say it differently but it's zach bogosian is how everybody says so it never clued in and she said she she looked at his name she's like oh it kind of sounds armenian but never said anything and i was like look look he's armenian so that was a fun moment look did you have to pause it literally i paused it i was like come here look it's the thing and boy when he's got a i i hate to make it about this

when he's got a shirt off i was like man if that guy if we're on a on an ancient battlefield and that guy's running towards me i'm running the other direction he's got jason momoa energy just yes yeah yeah just a beast and you realize you know he's got eats human flesh energy yeah yes yes and a look too and and and you know you realize like what's mitch martyr 5 10 uh no mitch marner's six feet tall he's okay so mitch marder looks small and like you compare him a zach bogosian and the meat that he has on his body versus mitch marder who's probably not that much shorter but just thin yeah right just a thinner guy just naturally i always defend this i've stood next to mitch marder people think he's short he's six feet tall that's a big dude yeah he is he's

he's very slender that's he's six feet tall well i gotta tell you um he's not as thick as bogosian know are we gonna get to thornton versus eelers well yeah i'm so glad i'm so glad because of all the i don't know if we brought it up when we were talking about what i hope is in the documentary but i remember in the moment being like why is joe thornton so upset with ehlers and they got the whole thing yes i was so happy the amount he's chirping constant you diver you diver i don't dive and i don't know if you if it was ehlers or one of his teammates i think it was one of his teammates you're dead too you fucker yeah and the ref all credit all credit to the referee he did the right thing like the the ref played the moment perfectly how first of all

How are you supposed to calm down this 41-year-old man who's throwing a hit? Who's six foot a million. And so tall. Remember we talked about calling the rule book? This ref fully acknowledged, I gave you the first one. Yeah! Because he cross-checked him and broke his stick, went back to the bench to get a new one and cross-checked that one. Just to cross-check a guy.

He got a hockey stick. What a moment. That was one of my top three moments of the whole series. And he kept going at him. When I watched that actual game, first off, we were wondering what the heck went wrong. Nobody could figure out what it was. Now that we know, I watched that thinking, does he think, because the Jets had a good season, sneaky good. Does he think that they're going to play in the second round?

I think it was a combination of that and the Jimmy Vesey storyline coming back. Because Vesey was given an opportunity with Tavares and Nylander. thornton the leafs top two left wingers to start last season we think the leafs have a hole in the wing now the leafs top two centers to start last season were thornton number one vc number two right that's how it started right and vc eventually moved down the lineup and he never found his thing and i remember seeing that and being like all right i don't know why you picked eelers but But Thornton is playing like a fourth liner. He's playing like a grunt.

He's doing the annoying work, the abuse, the stuff that Matthews and Marner can't be wasting their time with. There's a guy who's been in the NHL for 20 years and gets it. Yeah. I mean, sorry, star players should be able to stick up for themselves. But that's a 41-year-old who probably knew from the get-go. all right you're gonna you'll get your cookies at the beginning of the season when the games aren't all that important you'll get to play your month or two with marner and matthews but it'll be fun we'll use you sparingly we'll probably do it on the power play when you don't really have to

skate anywhere but when push comes to shove and you know we just got nick felino you're gonna get shoved down the lineup and you're going to have to be this six foot four 230 pound man that you forget joe thornton is sometimes yeah yes and be physically imposing and kind of scary and he was that beard and that like he's such a chill guy and he's like listening to his own clip at the beginning and he doesn't get mad at burke right we talked about right he's got six chickens on his farm in saint thomas yeah that's the quote and then and then just just angry joe thornton is pretty scary oh and i know healers is a good skater and i know that he's a good player and would love to have him on the Leafs get it but I don't think if I'm Nick Ehlers I'm not slightly

a little bit intimidated right oh 100% what what what struck me about that and god I just I'll stand by this the Leafs get through the second round they they they murdered the Jets they just they murdered them I remember uh just ticking that uh game in my memory and going no one stood up for ehlers that's true they pushed and shoved a few times yeah why didn't someone confetti gloves and mall thornton well who wants to do that who's on the team that's gonna do that someone someone do it do it and get your ass kicked this is the national hockey league do it and get your ass kicked that's nicolai ehlers anyone on the jets roster are you less important than nicolai ehlers okay identify yourself as that and then do something because

one of the most important players in your team is getting bullied is getting bullied by a 41 year old in the fourth line of a team we're probably going to play in the second round so you're talking about thornton going at a guy because oh we might have to play these guys at some point in the playoffs where the hell were the jets that's a good point where were they wow no wonder montreal toyed with them what does it say about edmonton but like no wonder montreal who was a take no prisoners team dealt with them like they were nothing brushed them off brushed them off yeah that losing shifley um so there was that uh and then yeah that small point that doesn't help yeah listen we lost our best player soon to find out um there's a couple of things here

and this is again where i thought this episode was it was like the last oh my god i can watch without without wanting to physically be like you know tense right yeah and the next thing i loved was the ridiculousness of the coffee group and cafe med three cafe med three which again and i think morgan riley says it perfectly he's like we literally bring a whole thing on the on the plane wherever we go an extra medical trunk yeah yeah for for coffee i i would watch a an amazon prime morgan riley reality show i love him he oh yeah i love him so much good dude so good i would it's like an idiot abroad except he's not an idiot he just doesn't have time for anyone he's just surrounded by them yeah because like because here's the thing it's literally he speaks the

most truth yeah in the entire episode but he's like he's like yeah it wouldn't be an idiot abroad it'd be these idiots here right he's around me compose the most confident most stable like i could see why morgan riley was second to be captain morgan riley has been 47 years old for at least 20 and we forget he's 26 yeah right crazy and and so so you know it and i get it too because from the from the other guy's perspective it's like you gotta find ways to to the pandemic taught us anything you gotta find ways to find joy in the little things yeah so if you're gonna be like they're they're hockey players they can't like party too much there's nowhere to party anyway and and you can only play video games for so long something's got to be like

what is a part of your everyday that you can be obsessed about because these guys are already obsessive people they're hockey players they're obsessed with hockey you got to take your mind off something and put it onto something else and i think that's what the coffee thing it's an outlet it's a thing we can talk about and bond over something that isn't hockey for 10 minutes a day and that is a great psychological thing for us who is it hyman who is like oh i don't even like that you know about that it's like yeah when they're uh they're on the walk and then he talks about it yeah i told you about the coffee club it's uh it's literally the finer things club from the office yeah it's so so lunchroom bogosian is andy who's trying to get into the finer things

club and then jim and nick felino is jim who gets in and skirts the line ahead of them it's literally the same thing it's it's amazing the finer things that's so good and you know and like you see them you see Zach Hyman in the background pouring the water in a circular motion they went deep on this I kind of love that and I'm surprised was that ever reported I've never heard of it

there's nobody in the locker rooms like there's no reporting from inside the arena so I don't know how you would know we need Connor Carrick if you're watching or listening we need an emergency podcast we need to know

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you gotta try breakfast at a and w at participating a and w locations in ontario and then later in the episode you see william nylander and the boys out driving their porsches at the racetrack which i think is you know what's nice what i noticed about that was it was you could tell some of the restrictions had loosened well obviously they weren't able to do that they wouldn't have been able to do that in any of the previous episodes right so um that one was like oh well like at least there was some hope in the air right right before the playoffs yes but you know me mother hen so okay so you you were watching that and going and saying what when they arrived at the track oh that'll be fun oh good for them what did you think i i was

thinking oh i want to do that yeah i want to go race race cars on a track yeah okay you want to know my first thought don't get injured whose dog is that there was a dog on the track right next to the track i'm like whose dog is that like they weren't on a leash or anything i'm like get that dog oh yeah and like i'm sure they took all the precautions but immediately my first thought was dog i thought your first thought would be because you sometimes you my friend you are worst case scenarios uh and what if they can what if they crash can you blame me no i was part of me was like how is this allowed like surely you gotta let people live live i agree but surely somewhere in their contract they're like don't drive dangerously or something like that i'm sure

they went slow well i was finally it didn't look like they were going that fast no no no i was glad i yeah i think some of the car sounds were maybe edited in maybe and they're doing like 60 kilometers an hour all the americans are like that's actually kind of fast um i i was so glad to finally get a payoff for uh remember we talked about episode one and in the first two minutes they used to show little teasy clips yep from all throughout the season and i'm like when do they drive the race cars and they arrive at the track i'm like yes finally finally we get to see it and we rasp of sandin exists i forgot how tough of a season he had he did and still ended up playing like power play one minutes in the playoffs

he did and scoring a very important goal yeah um but i suppose we'll get do you remember the guys Who were at the racetrack Because it was organized by Willie Willie Rasmus for sure Matthews was there I was just thinking about The crew because there was only like a handful Of them right

Well there were probably only X amount of cars Hey do you guys have 25 race cars Right I just thought about like the guys Like Tavares is probably not going because he's got a kid You know like stuff like that Sorry honey I'm going to go drive race cars Yeah

yeah and and less than a one-year-old at home like right you know right i i think uh i think that's part of it too like you know some of the guys sticking around playing uh that baseball game on switch right you know and i think uh i think you know the young guys can do that because like what am i going home to right but the older guys are like i got a family gotta go home right that's that's the way it goes um the other thing and i loved this sort of at the end and it's it's you know that dubas is a student of sport right there's i've read several of the books that he has talked about reading and i i hadn't i didn't know about this one i hadn't read this one but when he recants the bill belichick tom brady story where tom brady's a three-time

super bowl champion at this point and i guess the game's not going their way the next season and bill belichick goes over to him and says do your job right for once the man's tom brady three super bowls already already among one of the best quarterbacks of all time do your job right for once three super bowls or as tom brady would refer to someone who has three super bowls as today a bum yeah yeah how many does he have now seven seven i believe seven seven six do i have it wrong i think it might be six with the patriots and then 71 with the bucks last year god that's stupid yeah again this year i don't know that's a good team looks likely uh so yeah i i just i love that and i think it it speaks to these type of intensity

uh that that uh we're going for the least want to achieve but the one thing and again foreshadowing on this one will arnett saying ah the leafs lose they drop the last one in winnipeg no big deal right they i it reminded me like the whole the whole focus from management and keith's standpoint keith especially has been process and as fans i guess the pressure was off because they had number one locked up we just didn't want guys getting hurt we just wanted to go in healthy because remember all right we're gonna get hyman back we're gonna get bogosian back um felino we're gonna get felino back um maybe freddy but we got campbell now maybe freddy and freddy gets into that second last game uh and they had to make a decision on that which we saw and um like literally

just get in okay but they really really were not playing their best hockey no not at all and that's why i thought i was like oh that one that's a line that stung you know one and they know that at any point outside of the edmonton series were they playing their best hockey in this series like we we see throughout the the whole overarching narrative is that keith is trying to get them stanley cup ready and at no point is he satisfied because he sees it and then they go into the playoffs and we know how it ends and very few of their games were works of art there were a few clown show games against the canucks who just their whole season was a mess and the sands and the sands there were who gave them fits all year except for like one game and that should have been

had i personally i look at that and i go had i been a smarter man had i been bored a smarter man the team that's given them the most trouble all year is the team that never quits and and and here's so that's the senators gosh and then the team that doesn't quit and makes it to the playoffs the canadians every player never quit never so you see where this is going and and i well i i wasn't as bothered by it in the moment because i'm like okay they're not playing their best and they're still finding ways to win yeah which they were not previously doing but the leafs expectations were higher than that which i am comforted by but it didn't didn't uh correlate with uh playoff success yeah wow so that basically brings us to episode five

which will drop tomorrow who's ready to hurt we need to listen leaf fans you need to watch this with us it's therapy yeah you have to it is this is this is uh we gotta we gotta write down these memories throw them in a garbage can in front of us and burn it that's what this next episode is going to be right right i definitely go ahead jesse go ahead i was i was just gonna say up until this point i mean i was like okay who haven't we heard from and tj brody oh yeah never never really in it no no i'm sure there were guys who like i wanted to hear more from spezza and he was just sort of like oh i sure like my sticks yeah yeah well that's in the next episode but also with the expect that's okay uh but also with the thing is that uh um you know the the one i

think the most poignant spezza moment was back in the first episode when keith's like hey uh i know the young players are not too happy with me and spezza's like yeah that would be right uh and he's like i'm trying to get them to play a particular way can you help me out with that and and he does and uh there are some spezza moments in episode five that i definitely want to talk about but you're right there are certain guys where it's like yeah they were just they're not yeah they didn't their background pieces yes you know and i was just up until this point i was like okay we got one episode left and it's gonna focus on the main event so i was like oh we're not gonna hear from blank blank and blank because they're just they weren't the main characters it's

impossible to there's too many guys like there's just too many guys like that's why rasp is sandy just kind of appears behind the wheel of a car like it's you there are too many guys too many moments uh so rather than tell everyone's story poorly they chose to tell a few very well i have a feeling that if they had wanted to and i don't know why uh why why you choose an episode amount or whatever i don't produce tv shows but i have a feeling that had they wanted to they could have done like 20 episodes on this thing oh absolutely like there is so much there meaty stuff so when we come back which is tomorrow we release our last episode of aonfr it's actually starting to kind of ring as we say it um we're going to talk about the thing that everybody's been dreading

but the thing that you need to see the thing that you need to experience again to get a little bit of closure and that honestly is what i got out of it hopefully you get the same the Steve Dangle podcast follow the guys on Twitter at Steve underscore Dangle at Adam W Y L D E and at Jesse Blake connection complete