How Maple Leafs rookie Bobby McMann defied the odds to become an NHL player
Bobby McMann sat across from Toronto Maple Leafs management faced with a question.
The Toronto Marlies were nearing the end of a middling 2021-22 regular season. McMann’s 24 goals – a team rookie record – were a rare highlight. Their postseason chances were up in the air but the ECHL’s Newfoundland Growlers’ were not. And so, McMann was asked in a meeting how he would feel about flying back east for a game to be eligible for the Growlers postseason, just in case.
McMann wondered to himself: Is that where they see me?
The then 25-year-old was always the kid who had to overwork because he had gone overlooked in junior hockey and the NHL drafts. He was willing to take every opportunity, be it in Junior A hockey, a lesser-known NCAA program or sent down to the ECHL to start his AHL contract in the hopes of achieving his NHL dream.
But after years of work and his breakout season, McMann finally felt confident enough to say, “No, thank you.”
“I didn’t think, at the very least, (the ECHL) was going to benefit my game,” McMann said. “If I thought it was going to develop my game, I would have gone, but the way the game is played in the AHL, it’s closer to the NHL, and that’s where I wanted to be.”
Those close to McMann believe the Leafs were testing him with the question: Where did he see himself?
McMann’s confidence meant he passed the test. Just days later the Leafs signed him to his first NHL contract. He was later told by former Leafs GM Kyle Dubas that management had thought long and hard about signing him for the 2022 playoffs.
Since then, McMann has become one of the more redeeming stories on the Leafs roster by following through on that conversation with management, and following through on his dream: McMann is one of just two undrafted regulars on the Leafs roster, an unlikely 27-year-old NHL rookie who earned his spot with the same hard-nosed determination he’s shown through his entire career.
You wouldn’t know it when you see McMann use his 6-foot-2 frame to try and run over everything in sight, but he was once considered too small.
“(McMann) was a late bloomer,” Cole Fischer, McMann’s minor hockey coach in Lloydminster, Alta., said. “Under the radar at Bantam. He always continued to be an unknown. But he had a full boatload of skill and potential.”
Even with that potential, McMann didn’t hit his growth spurt until after his WHL draft year. It didn’t help that McMann was far from being Mr. Type A.
The reality of junior hockey is that some hop on the track toward success, but when McMann wasn’t drafted to the WHL his train appeared to leave the station. He was 16 playing minor hockey when other 16-year-olds were moving up WHL lineups. In Lloydminster, the attention for the smallish forward with decent hands didn’t come.
“With the team game, (McMann) was a little behind,” Fischer admitted. “I would say, nicely, that he didn’t like to move the puck a lot back then.”
Junior A hockey is often seen as a last-chance saloon for the likes of McMann. He travelled even further north to Bonnyville, a town of just over 5,000 that flirts with the edges of civilization in northern Alberta to keep his dream alive. To do so, he relied on what many of his peers did not possess: A ceaseless work ethic instilled by his blue-collar parents, Connie, who worked in a bank, and Cecil, who worked in a canola plant.
“Bobby never pouted or complained,” Rick Swan, McMann’s coach with the Bonnyville Pontiacs, said. “He was never entitled. He always understood that if he worked harder than anyone else, he would eventually get what he desired.”
McMann had a choice: He could accept his fate as a player with potential and nothing more, or he could dig in and make sacrifices for his future.
Shy by nature, he chose work instead of play.
“If you’ve been in small towns, you know there are players who work hard and are dedicated, but then come Friday night they’re at the golf course or whatever with their buddies, having a few drinks or relaxing,” Adam Huxley, McMann’s longtime trainer, said.
McMann and his father would rent ice on Friday nights. Cecil would feed his son pucks so McMann could hit his goal of shooting 10,000 pucks a year.
The 1.45 points per game McMann scored as a 20-year-old, tops in the Alberta Junior Hockey League, were partly why Colgate University offered McMann a scholarship. He had offers from larger schools, but Colgate promised McMann plenty of ice time to get noticed by NHL teams.
McMann’s life ended up changing in unseen ways in Upstate New York. On the ice, he learned that the goals he scored in small-town Alberta wouldn’t translate in the pros the way an energy-focused game would.
“While he had the expectation at Colgate that he had to be the Auston Matthews of the team and go score a goal because we were down one, he had to reinvent himself if he wanted to have success at the highest level,” Ben Sharf, a teammate and roommate at Colgate, said. “I laugh because he delivers more hits in one game in Toronto than he did in his entire career at Colgate.”
But off the ice, McMann finally came out of his shell. On a whim, he registered for a drama class. Something clicked when McMann stepped on makeshift stages.
“His acting capabilities are fantastic,” Sharf said. “He’s generally reserved, when you put him in an acting class, he’s completely the opposite.”
“(Acting) forces you to just be completely ridiculous in scenarios in front of people that you don’t know,” McMann said. “So you realize that nothing you really do is that big of a deal and you can be ridiculous.”
McMann’s most notable performance came in front of over 400 people at a sorority’s formal event for a midterm exam. McMann had planned on lip-synching Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” in front of his class, but when one of his teammates was unable to properly pull off his routine with a shoulder injury, McMann stepped in as part of a troupe performing The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.”
“He’s one of the funniest, and goofiest people I know,” Sharf said of McMann. “But you’ve got to get to know him on a meaningful level to get to that person. And then you’re like, ‘Where the hell did this person come from?’”
McMann then landed in Toronto, where a two-year AHL contract offered him a chance to flirt with the NHL. He accepted a loan to the ECHL’s Wichita Thunder during the COVID-impacted 2020-21 season to start his professional career.
“He’s a very intelligent kid, and he knew that he had a two-year window to make the Leafs, which was very small compared to 21-year-old prospects coming out of junior,” then-Marlies assistant John Snowden said.
McMann’s alarm would go off at ungodly hours on Sunday mornings to take long runs to improve his fitness before creeping into a quiet arena to continue to hit that magic number of 10,000 shots.
“He knew it was going to take sacrifices to get to the next level, whether that was not being with your buddies or being with your girlfriend or whatever it may be,” Snowden said. “This game, for guys like him, is about sacrifices. And he does that every day.”
To crack a top-heavy Leafs team in a depth role, McMann learned he had to use his strength properly. He became dedicated to mastering the finer details of the game. McMann demanded notoriously long video sessions with Marlies coaches.
The conversations between Sheldon Keefe and the Marlies staff about McMann intensified in 2022. But it wasn’t the goals McMann was piling up that stuck out. Keefe was adamant: For McMann to play in the NHL, he had to win his puck battles nearly every time. He had to extend time in the offensive zone to set up Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner for their next shift.
A dirty job, but one McMann always dreamt of. And so he implored the Marlies staff for extra time to learn how to win wall and puck battles.
“His ability to track and get pucks back was at the top of the AHL. That’s what made him so special,” Snowden said. “He was a puck retrieval machine.”
Finally, McMann had battled enough to achieve his dream. He was called up for his NHL debut in January 2023.
what a rush from Bobby McMann pic.twitter.com/tMtLScsTcX
— Omar (@TicTacTOmar) January 12, 2023
“That’s a guy that you can rely on,” Keefe said of McMann early in his NHL tenure.
After McMann recovered from a lingering adductor injury to start the 2023-24 season and got some AHL conditioning time, he was called back up to the Leafs. Ahead of their Sweden trip, he was regularly logging ice time at the bottom end of the team, including a humbling and forgettable 5:44 TOI in a Nov. 30 win over the Seattle Kraken.
But his work ethic hasn’t dissipated. McMann’s continued energy has seen his ice time creep back up. And after tens of thousands of shots taken quietly, on his own, McMann finally fired his first shot past an NHL goalie on Dec. 16.
BOBBY MCMANN! FIRST NHL GOAL! �� pic.twitter.com/C1mi5o6Rmi
— Omar (@TicTacTOmar) December 17, 2023
“The more (McMann) has played, he is getting more comfortable,” Keefe said on Dec. 23.
McMann has stood out because, unsexy as it might be, he’s continued to work his tail off.
Moving forward, the Leafs will likely add a forward toward the trade deadline, which will invariably force another forward out of the lineup. McMann will need to lean into his work ethic and outplay the competition. But as Keefe has alluded to, he’ll need to do so consistently instead of just early in the game.
McMann’s to-do list doesn’t end there: He’ll need to provide more playoff-ready physicality against the opposition’s best lines than Keefe might get from his offensively-inclined third line. He’ll also need to make simple defensive plays in his own zone to help his team get out of trouble.
Bobby McMann mixes it up with Werenski a bit pic.twitter.com/dT9hS8ifCR
— Omar (@TicTacTOmar) December 24, 2023
Looking back, McMann certainly isn’t the player he once was, forgotten by the hockey world in Alberta.
But if he can showcase the player and the person he’s become since then, the feel-good story could have another chapter in spring playoff hockey for McMann.
And if he has his way, McMann will keep improving, no matter his age, and his story will continue.
“It’s just about finding ways to constantly try and get an edge on guys,” McMann said, “and just try and climb in any environment.”
