"Next Year" – The Leafs' PR Strategy

Another Leafs’ season has ended with the phrase “next year” being repeated ad infinitum across the country.

It was pretty obvious by Christmas that the Leafs would be missing the playoffs for the sixth straight year, but a late season push did help to make the second half of the season slightly more engaging. 

So with nothing on the line in the final game on Saturday, Leafs’ president and GM, Brian Burke  decided to play his newly signed NCAA players Joe Colborne and Matt Frattin. 

Was it to get these young players a little bit of NHL experience? Possibly. Did the youngsters play so the Leafs brass could evaluate them against a playoff bound team? That’s part of it.

The main reason Colborne and Frattin saw considerable ice time on Saturday– bearing in mind that a year of Frattin’s contract was burned for the one-game call-up–  was to help soften the blow from critics whom have been hovering over Burke’s Leafs like a hungry dogs on a steak.

This was PR move. Issues management. 

In Burke’s own words, this season was a failure, and the thought of “next year” brings little comfort to us fans who will been hitting the lynx early, or forced to cheer for... ugrh... the Habs. But by playing these players in the final game, Burke can say, “ Hey, look. I’ve gotten these young guys, I am doing the right thing. We have got some good young talent that we never had before.” Which is true.

Both players played admirably in their first game, and showed promise, which helps Burke sell his “next year” flavoured Kool-Aid promotional campaign that should really have died out with the SARS scare. 

In doing so, fans were more concerned about the play of the youngsters, spending their 140 characters tweeting about #Colborne and #Frattin rather than #LeafsSuck or #FUBurke. 

And it worked. 

Saturday night both #Colborne and #Frattin were trending topics in Canada. 

Even the Leafs Message Board took a break from their constant bickering of the team’s direction to focus more on these individual players and the promise that they may or may not posses.   

I am impressed with the PR job Burke has done since taking the helm of the Leafs. He has juggled questions regarding the Kessel deal, calls for the head of coach Ron Wilson, and a playoff drought that has lasted longer than WWII. He has done all of this without throwing his staff under the bus, and has still retained the support of the MLSE board. He’s had to fix his mistakes, such as Beauchmine and Versteeg, without admitting that they were mistakes under the intense stare of the the Toronto media, while insisting this is all part of moving forward.  

So despite three seasons worth of failures, Burke has managed to come through smelling like roses, insisting that the team is improving and will be a contender in the next couple of years. And people believe him.

How does he do that?

He sticks to his message. “Next year.”