Jake McCabe remembers looking at his wife and two young children one last time before walking out of their home toward the strange unknown and a point in his career he’d never experienced.
“’All right, I’ll see you guys, when I see ya … ‘” the now-Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman remembers telling them as he departed for a February 2023 road trip with his Chicago Blackhawks ahead of the NHL trade deadline. McCabe wasn’t sure when he’d return.
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Uncertainty reigned supreme in the McCabe household.
McCabe was 29 and had experienced (mostly) full control over his career to that point. He spent parts of eight straight seasons with the Buffalo Sabres, who drafted him in 2012, then signed a four-year deal with the Blackhawks as a free agent and stayed just a few hours away from his birthplace of Eau Claire, Wisc.
He was one of the most sought-after defencemen ahead of the 2023 trade deadline but had never been traded before.
“You can prepare for it. But until you go through it, you don’t know what it’s like,” McCabe said.
Once McCabe landed in Toronto after the Leafs traded for him in the middle of a road trip, he was without his family. The adaptation process to Toronto and the Leafs created newfound stress.
It’s an element of professional sports that is sometimes forgotten: how mentally taxing it can be for any human, especially one with a young family, to be told on a moment’s notice they must uproot themselves and quickly stabilize in a city they’ve probably only known from hotel room windows.
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McCabe had never played in a single NHL playoff game when he arrived in Toronto. He knew most of the Leafs team only by having faced off against them in the Battle of the QEW for a few seasons. And there he was, expected to be a veteran presence in a playoff run.
“It’s tough, for sure, the transition to a new team,” McCabe said as he reflected on struggling to express his personality in a new dressing room. “Finding your role takes time.”
Through this first-round series against the Boston Bruins, McCabe has looked drastically improved compared to last season, when he was on the ice for 11 goals against at five-on-five, tied for the team lead.
Yet McCabe has been allowed that aforementioned time this season, his first full campaign as a Leaf, and has found his footing. With a heavy shot, increased physicality and a steadying presence, McCabe elevated his game and became one of the few Leafs to boast an improved season from 2022-23. At points throughout the regular season, you could make a case for McCabe as the team’s best blueliner.
You could have made that point again through a sterling Game 5 performance, during which he scored his first career playoff goal with that heavy shot, finished second on the Leafs with 22:40 including time on both the penalty kill and power play and threw six hits, a team high.
CABER CLAPPER! 💥 pic.twitter.com/VJ9Mjlqffy
— Toronto Maple Leafs (@MapleLeafs) April 30, 2024
Game 5 wasn’t a fluke. McCabe’s 62 percent five-on-five on-ice expected goals is tops among all Leafs defencemen through six games.
The Leafs will need McCabe to continue to be great to have any chance of coming back from down 3-2 in their first-round series.
Luckily for them, he is in a much different place than he was a year ago.
For four weeks after McCabe was dealt to Toronto, he languished in an empty home. It took that long for McCabe’s children to get their passports and travel into Canada to reunite as a family.
With no family around him, he was able to “focus fully” on hockey and adapting to a new team. But his performances stayed with him long after he returned home from the rink.
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“When I went home, it was hard to turn that hockey brain off, whether it was a good game or a bad game,” McCabe said.
Perhaps to be expected, McCabe’s play was impacted by being uprooted. He showed flashes of his strong all-round game, but the self-assuredness that any rugged defenceman needs in his game wasn’t always there.
His experience presents a window into what it actually looks like for a player to see his life flipped on its head midseason.
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McCabe is naturally confident. Through most of his time with the Sabres, he never shied away from speaking his mind in the dressing room. Leading players around him off the ice and performing confidently on it went hand-in-hand.
Yet he didn’t always live up to expectations in his first 32 games (regular season and playoffs combined) as a Leaf last season.
Turns out, the first part of that equation wasn’t in place.
McCabe struggled to find his voice. He experienced the same feeling during his first season in Chicago, one he admits he “didn’t really love.” He just wasn’t himself, and his play reflected that.
“When I was dealt here at the deadline, I contributed, but we had pretty much clinched our spot when I had gotten here. It’s a different feel, too, of being part of the group that earned the playoff spot,” McCabe said. “A guy like myself hadn’t even played in the playoffs yet. So, I’m not going to be the one to speak up in the room, not having been there yet.”
Fast forward to 2023 training camp.
From the outside, it’s easy to question what merit team-bonding activities like preseason golf outings, countless team dinners or prearranged games of poker on team flights actually have on the team itself.
But McCabe is one person who doesn’t question those at all. He might be naturally confident, but he also doesn’t possess the braggadocio of, say, a Ryan Reaves to assert himself regardless of the situation. McCabe needed a full season of those activities to call Toronto home off the ice and, again, start playing his most effective hockey on it.
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Take his increased role in the team’s longstanding game of poker. Again, from the outside, missing out on a game that starts at the beginning of the season might not sound like a massive hurdle to feeling like part of a team. But if it was through types of games that McCabe would have connected with teammates on previous teams, arriving late to the part would have thrown him out of sorts.
Having a full season at the card table allowed McCabe to come out of his shell.
“You get more comfortable with your coworkers, right? That has a lot to do with it,” McCabe said.
All in all, spending an entire regular season in Toronto saw him forge friendships with some of the Leafs’ other veterans and feel ownership over the team’s success in a way he didn’t in 2023. In doing so, McCabe looked like tremendous value for his $2 million cap hit this season. McCabe’s 20:39 average time on ice through the regular season was the second-highest of his nine full seasons. He hit a career high in points (28), too.
As T.J. Brodie struggled in the final season of his contract, McCabe emerged as the new steadying presence on the right side of the ice. That he was able to hop into the right side of the ice as a left shot defenceman (“For the longest time I hated playing my off side,” he said. “But now I love it.”) suggests he feels as comfortable as ever in his NHL career.
Never was that more evident than in Game 5.
With the Leafs’ back against the wall and facing elimination, McCabe was one of the team’s veterans who projected the kind of necessary resolute confidence the morning of the game. McCabe was aware that one win could plant a seed of doubt in the minds of the Bruins, considering Boston blew a 3-1 series lead against the Florida Panthers in the first round of last year’s playoffs.
“It’s definitely been brought up,” McCabe said. “Trying to put pressure on their group over there. Obviously they’re sitting comfy at 3-1, and we want to put pressure on that. It starts with a win tonight.”
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And he then backed it up with an early goal that was vital to the Leafs’ necessary strong start. The Leafs need more of McCabe’s no-nonsense attitude on the ice: get pucks to the net to overcome a scoring drought. Firing a shot on net for his first playoff goal ended up giving the Leafs a necessary boost, and decisive play at both ends of the ice followed in a must-win game.
No team can win in the playoffs without a defenceman of McCabe’s heavy-duty and trustable ilk. He won’t get pushed around by a Bruins team that wanted to do so early in the season. And as the series has gone on, not surprisingly, McCabe has eliminated many of the errors he made early on against the Bruins.
It’s taken time for McCabe to hit his stride as a Leaf. But he’s there now.
The Leafs still believe they’re in this series for the long haul.
And McCabe understands the value of time. That’s why more time, manifested in another game or two, could allow McCabe’s game to hit even higher highs in the most important games of the series.
“I’m trying to be a voice in the room,” McCabe said, “and a leader on the ice.”
(Photo: Brian Fluharty / Getty Images)