SIMMONS: Why don't Matthews and Marner have more Wendel and Gilmour in them?
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Wendel Clark doesn't really know how to explain it.
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How he elevated his game at playoff time.
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How his crazy intensity of regular-season hockey turned up more than a notch when the Stanley Cup playoffs began in Toronto.
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As a teenaged rookie, Clark scored five goals in his first 10 Stanley Cup games. He followed that up with six in his second season. In between all that, he was hitting and fighting and doing all the Wendel things that made him so beloved in Toronto.
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In the two magical Maple Leafs seasons still remembered so fondly, Clark scored 19 playoff goals in 39 games in 1993 and 1994, while smashing into anything around him and spending 75 minutes in the penalty box.
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If only there was some Wendel Clark in Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner. If only those two Maple Leafs giants — in salary and regular-season numbers — had some of the qualities that made Wendel Clark, Wendel Clark.
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Clark was built to play against — or for — the Florida Panthers. He was a more-dynamic Matthew Tkachuk, with a Matthews-Sam Reinhart kind of wrist shot and a body needing to engage in collision. He would have been the perfect Craig Berube player.
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He wasn't the only Maple Leaf to grow come playoff time. Probably no one in Leafs history did it better than the rather tiny man himself, Doug Gilmour.
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In the years in which Clark scored 19 goals, Gilmour had the two greatest individual playoff seasons in Leafs history. He had 63 points in 39 games in '93 and '94. No one will ever come close to that again.
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And in doing so, Gilmour, more playmaker than the goal scorer and once traded for Berube, wound up with 16 post-season goals over those two years. Before that, he had scored 11 for the Flames in the only season Calgary won the Stanley Cup and he scored nine for St. Louis and led the playoffs in points without making it to the final with the Blues.
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Gilmour never has completely been able to unpack what is was about him that made him so special in the biggest moments and the largest games. But he had it. In Toronto, in St. Louis, in Calgary, in Montreal — pretty much everywhere he played.
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And they can't turn the better comparable of Marner, the ultimate playmaker, into Gilmour, the ultimate playmaker. It looked like it was there for Marner when he scored giant playoff points — 44 in 18 games — when playing junior for the London Knights.
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His whole game is measured statistically and always will be. Not known for his goal scoring, Marner has scored at 16-goal pace in the post-season after scoring at 21-goal pace in the regular season.
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