Oilers Insider Destroys Maple Leafs Media With Savage Rant

Connor McDavid skates against Auston Matthews in Oilers-Maple Leafs game

This whole Connor McDavid saga hasn't done much to soothe any bad feelings between Edmonton Oilers and Toronto Maple Leafs fans. While fans in Oil Country wait breathlessly for McDavid to make up his mind on an extension (hint: this could be a while), some in Leafs Nation figure that the superstar's indecision is because he really wants to come home and play for his hometown Leafs.

Oilers insider Bob Stauffer has had it with the narrative coming out of Toronto, and absolutely WENT OFF on the city and its fans on his Oilers Now podcast (h/t David Staples, Edmonton Journal). He began his rant like so:

Do you think that there might be guys working in Toronto that would like nothing more than to see McDavid there in Toronto. Many of them grew up in Toronto. They haven’t gotten to a Stanley Cup final since I was one. Okay? That’s 58 years ago. That’s a long time… I got a good memory, but I don’t remember that 1967 Leafs team. I don’t. Apparently, I was watching it a little bit back in the day. But they haven’t got to a Stanley Cup final. How many times have they won more than a series?!

The answer to that is none. At least in this current era of the Maple Leafs. Nine years of the Auston Matthews-Mitch Marner era produced two playoff series wins. Never more than one. Now Marner is gone, and Matthews has three seasons to run on his four-year extension.

But Stauffer says it's the way that people in Toronto seem to expect McDavid to come to his hometown to play that really irks him:

There’s always been a little bit of this undertone. And this is part of the reason why some of the people that work in the game in other Canadian markets don’t like Toronto. Because there is this air of superiority, not from all… It’s not even understated, it’s pretty overt. ‘Oh yeah, you guys don’t really deserve him, and he’s gonna wanna play here, and that’s just the way it’s gonna be.'...
Sometimes there’s not a lot of logic in Toronto, or in the province of Ontario.

Staples added his own personal take on what he thinks drives the whole thing:

"Thornhill’s McDavid ending up in Edmonton, just as Brantford’s Wayne Gretzky did, was something of a nightmare for many Leaf fans and Toronto boosters, and it’s been making them crazy ever since."

Finally, Stauffer topped off his rant with one final take on Toronto:

I don’t always think we have to take our marching orders from Toronto. That’s why we crack jokes like, ‘How do you change a light bulb in Toronto? You hold it there and have the rest of Canada revolve around it.’