Monday Morning Halfback: With Ovechkin preparing for curtain call, Maple Leafs are ready for a close-up

Jamie Ross is the sports editor at The Globe; Cathal Kelly is the national sports columnist.

Jamie Ross: Hey Cathal, the Toronto Maple Leafs did a number on the Colorado Avalanche on the road Saturday night, taking a 6-3 win. Care to revise your preseason expectations for the boys in blue? Just wait ‘til Gavin McKenna starts scoring.

Cathal Kelly: The beauty of the Leafs is that they don’t just fail to meet expectations. They take expectations by the hair and spend months dragging them up to a great height overlooking the rest of the NHL. Then they chuck expectations off it.

It wouldn’t be a classic Leafs season if, at some point, all the doubters didn’t believe that things may have changed and that corner has been turned.

What the Leafs should be doing is going the Major League Soccer route and getting everyone to agree on flipping the season around – in their case, from winter to summer. That way, being the best team in October would mean something.

One thing we just missed last week was the announced retirement of Alex Ovechkin. You’re one of the exceedingly rare media professionals who has emotions. Did you get a little misty thinking about the departure of Vladimir Putin’s most famous cheerleader?

JR: Turning the page from the Leafs, just like that? Very un-Cathal of you. Fine.

Re: Ovechkin, I don’t feel anything at all for him. He is a goal-scoring machine, but aside from that one all-time bender he went on after winning the Washington Capitals’ only Stanley Cup, he’s never much moved the needle for me as a personality.

I do wonder how he will be received on his Jeter-style retirement tour. The league seems all too happy to facilitate and promote it, his support for the war apparently a non-issue.

CK: The NHL would write press-release hosannahs to a trout if it had ever gotten HBO’s attention.

Ovechkin was the unusual hockey player who enjoyed all kinds of attention. Every hockey player loves the good sort, but most are terrified of the bad. Ovechkin didn’t seem to care.

He had that gift for being cheeky, but not crude. Simple, but never stupid. It’s an art.

Opinion: Alexander Ovechkin used his fame to back Putin. We must remember that

It’s telling that upon his turn into political darkness, all that cleverness vanished. Publicly, Ovechkin’s gone from a real wild man to the sort of boring dad who spends his downtime watching whatever the Russian equivalent of Fox News is – ‘Uzbeks been drinking my battery acid!’ (Kisses a finger and points it skyward for John Candy).

I will miss the Ovechkin we knew 15 years ago. This current Ovechkin? Have fun defending Volgograd, pal. Don’t feel the need to write.

Also, can we have done with the year-long farewell tour? Did Nicklas Lidstrom spend a full season bogarting all the oxygen on his team so that the Downtown San Jose Business District could give him a commemorative rocking chair as he rolled through town? No, he did not. Be like Nicklas. When it’s time to go, just go.

You want Leafs? I can Leafs all day. You mentioned McKenna and his scoring problem. What are the geniuses on Polymarket thinking? Is this going to happen or what? Should I be HELOC’ing the house?

JR: Do I want Leafs? No. But in this town, it’s the done thing.

I have friends so enamoured with this organization that when I show them a screengrab of a Leafs media communique announcing something Elliotte Friedman tweeted seven minutes ago, they marvel at my access and very seriously ask if there’s a way I can get them on that mailing list. Which is to say I do understand all this attention on poor McKenna.

He’s the shiny new toy and this city has big plans for him, whether he likes it or not. Me and you can sit here and scoff at the microscopic level of coverage for his handful of games, but we also exist on that food chain. The goals will come, or they won’t. This fan base will eventually find something else with which to work itself into a lather – a player will say or do something ill-advised, like flip off the TV camera – and the cycle will repeat.

Opinion: Maple Leafs waste no time burdening Gavin McKenna with pressure

Speaking of hysteria, the WNBA Finals start Saturday, but once again, Sophie Cunningham is front and centre. The Athletic and the Guardian rolled out takedowns of Cunningham, accusing her of courting controversy in order to draw more attention to herself.

According to Candace Buckner at The Athletic, the juice is not worth the squeeze and the Indiana Fever should let Caitlin Clark’s bodyguard walk. If you’re the Indiana GM, what’s your move?

CK: If I’m the Indiana GM, I ask the Indiana owner what he thinks I should do. And if I’m the Indiana owner, I buy her a podcast studio for Christmas. Everything Cunningham says makes news. And let’s be honest – she’s fun.

There’s a reason the WNBA is a rocket ship to the top, while the PWHL struggles to grab attention outside the true believers, and it’s not the quality of the product.

The WNBA understands that, at this point in their growth cycle at least, conflict is a marketing strategy. The more people are talking about Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese – though that’s mostly a made-up rivalry – the more they will be invested in the rest of your show.

We’ve gotten used to a world where all you need to do to make money at sports is to put them on. That world can’t last. There’s too much sports.

Women’s sports is already starting to face an issue about pricing. At the outset, they were the reasonable option for families. This is why men’s sports tolerated the competition so mildly. Because they could say to people, ‘You’re angry that we charge 500 bucks a seat in the lower bowl? Well, why don’t you head down the street to see the other professional basketball at a tenth of the price?’

But now the women want to be paid, as they should. That means no more cheap seats. That means getting people so hooked that the product becomes inelastic.

In the interim between launch and landing, you need to be hoovering up customers, however you can manage it. Cunningham is the league’s most effective barker and attention magnet. She’s a next-gen Dennis Rodman. Every team should want her.

Last one – Larry Millson, who passed this week, aged 83.

I joined the Jays beat nearly 20 years ago, at which point Mills was wrapping up a long career covering the team. Upon retiring, Mills just never left.

A few people are furniture on beats. Mills was the all-knowing ottoman. He could tell you the intricacies of a play that happened 40 years ago. Who was on base. Who was at bat. Who the GM was on the phone with. We should all love something the way Mills loved baseball.

JR: Larry spent more than three decades at The Globe. Our former colleague and editor extraordinaire Phil King said it better than I could, so I would encourage readers to check out his appreciation in the Saturday paper.

I was happy to see Larry during the Blue Jays’ run to the World Series last year. True to form, he had lots to say. Journalists love to talk, and Larry could do it with the best of them.

I know a lot of people who worked alongside him over the years are feeling his loss, and my heart goes out to them.