‘The head of the snake’: How Chris Tanev personifies the Leafs’ new-attitude defense
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Kristen Shilton
TORONTO — If Chris Tanev earned a nickname this season, it might be “vintage.”
The 35-year-old defenseman is turning back the clock on Toronto’s blue line, with a showcase of physical sacrifice in the name of team success. The results are not only some of his best ever, but he has helped elevate the Leafs where they need it most. That’s a tall order from one player — unless you’re Tanev, the emerging crown jewel in Toronto’s defense who is even captivating the competition.
“He’s kind of like the head of the snake back there on their back end,” said Matthew Tkachuk, who spent two seasons as Tanev’s teammate in Calgary. “I’ve always said how great a player he’s been for years. But to see him at this stage, and continuing to do it year after year, it’s incredible. You can tell just by the way he conducts himself and talks to [his] team and blocks shots and leads by example … I’ve seen it. It’s no surprise to see what he’s doing now.”
Tanev’s tenacity might be no great shock, but even Tkachuk couldn’t have predicted how Tanev has helped turn the Leafs into a two-headed monster — one not only capable of scoring many goals, but setting a solid defensive tone, too.
To put it charitably, goal suppression hasn’t been Toronto’s forte over the past decade.
It’s on full display now throughout the Leafs’ postseason run, and Tanev has turned his own play up a notch further in Toronto’s second-round series against the Florida Panthers.
According to Stathletes, Tanev has absorbed more hits (81) in the playoffs than any skater, and he’s second in blocked shots (25). He’s also the Leafs’ postseason leader in plus-minus (+5) and was tops in that category during the regular season too (+31) when he and Jake McCabe produced a plus-11 goal differential at 5-on-5.
If all those bodily beatings have taken a toll on Tanev, you’d never know it from the smile — revealing a gap from some teeth dislodged along the way — etched permanently on his face.
“Every day is a great day,” he said, when asked how he’s feeling. “You wake up and you’re happy and you come to the rink.”
That sunny disposition is another Tanev hallmark, one that works in tandem with his ferocious on-ice attitude. There’s a complexity to the veteran’s character — he’s known to be unassuming, a silent observer who’s quietly funny. Tanev doesn’t court the spotlight, but it has found him in these playoffs where a commanding individual performance has propelled Toronto during its most promising playoff run in years. Attention was bound to follow.
“He’s a guy who goes out and gives it his all every single game,” Maple Leafs forward Mitch Marner said. “It’s something you really love to have on your team. He puts his body on the line every single shift as well. I think that’s why we’re having so much success is because of him.”
WHEN IT COMES to playoff hockey, you’ve got to “play each night like you’re willing to die on that ice,” according to veteran Leafs forward Max Pacioretty.
That’s Tanev’s style year-round. And the Leafs have needed a player like him on defense for too long.
Toronto general manager Brad Treliving knew Tanev could be a difference-maker from his time as the Flames’ GM during Tanev’s four-year tenure with the team. He anchored Calgary’s back end right up until Treliving’s successor in Calgary, Craig Conroy, traded him to Dallas in February 2024 as the Flames entered a rebuilding phase.
Tanev was a pending unrestricted free agent at the time, and a coveted right-shot defender like him wouldn’t last long on the free agent market. Treliving wanted early access to Tanev’s potential services and acquired his rights from the Stars last June in exchange for a 2026 seventh-round draft pick and prospect Max Ellis. The move gave Toronto an exclusive window to negotiate with Tanev toward a long-term deal, and by July 1 they had come together on a six-year, $27 million contract.
The Toronto native was officially coming home. And Tanev’s reputation as a grinder preceded him right into the Leafs’ room. He was then fresh off Dallas’ run to a Western Conference finals appearance, a stretch where Tanev led the playoff field in blocked shots (73 in 19 games) after finishing fourth in that category during the regular season (207).
Craig Berube was also new to the Leafs, coming on board for his first season as head coach, and Berube’s north-south playstyle fit in perfectly with Tanev’s take-no-prisoners perspective.
“He’s an old school type of guy,” Berube said. “He’s a warrior. He’s a competitive person. He’s right up there with all the ones that have been around, laying his body on the line every night, whether it’s a block, or taking a hit to make a play. You name it. He’s going to lay it on the line.”
That’s been painfully clear in the Leafs’ series against Florida. Tanev has taken a beating from the Panthers in stride, even when it has hurt. There was the hit from behind by Brad Marchand in Game 4; Tanev simply popped back up like a kernel — just like he did following a crushing hit in Game 2 (although Tanev was a bit slower off the ice on that one). He was also crushed by Panthers forward Carter Verhaeghe in the first period of Friday’s Game 3 — but not before he got the puck to McCabe.
It was only moments later that John Tavares scored to extend the Leafs’ lead in that one. Consider Tanev with a third assist there, from executing the sort of game-changing move that can give the opposition fits.
“That’s the strength of him, is that he’ll hang onto the puck an awful lot to make plays,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “And he makes plays. He’s probably underrated in some of his puck movement. He’s been doing that forever. He blocks shots, takes hits; keeps playing.”
Others may wince in the wake of Tanev’s fearlessness. The thought process is just second nature now though.
“Sometimes you’re trying to draw guys in and sort of absorb a hit before you move [the puck],” he said. “Probably there are some times where I can move it a little quicker, but that’s just playoff hockey and that’s what happens.”
Tanev isn’t one to bellyache either, whether he’s feeling the burn or not. It’s an inspiring commitment that has rubbed off on Tanev’s teammates: If he’s willing to put his weight into every shift, then the group’s collective defensive effort has to be there, too.
“You see some plays and you think after the game he’s going to be complaining about it, and you don’t hear a word from him about it,” Pacioretty said. “He just goes about his business. And that was throughout the entire year. You see a shot block earlier in the year, and you’re like, ‘Oh, man, you must be hurting or limping for days’ and he just comes back to the rink like nothing happened.
“So he’s extremely tough, and he’s willing to sacrifice everything for the team, and that doesn’t go unnoticed in that room.”
By just how much, exactly?
“He’s up there [as toughest teammate],” defenseman Simon Benoit said. “He’s got to be up there, like, top one.”
TANEV HAS MANY TALENTS on the ice.
He’s got a few off it, too. And, like plenty else about him, learning how Tanev spends his downtime was an eye-opener.
“I found out he’s doing schoolwork on the road a lot, which I think is crazy,” Marner said. “But he’s dedicated to working hard, and anything he starts he wants to finish and that’s something you appreciate. It’s impressive.”
Tanev didn’t exactly plan on textbooks filling his suitcase as an NHL player. Then again, he didn’t see a global pandemic coming, either. But when the league shut down in 2020, Tanev decided to make the most of it, picking up on the finance degree he started as a player at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2009.
“I went to school for a year and left and took a ten-year break,” Tanev joked. “When COVID happened, my wife was like, ‘why don’t you start taking classes [again]?” We were just sitting at home. And I’ve been doing it since. So I’m almost done.”
The business side of life comes “naturally” to Tanev, something he hinted at when explaining why he wanted to sign with Toronto in the first place. When asked at the time why he would want to leave a place like Texas, with its low state income tax, to be in Canada, where taxes are notably higher, Tanev had an educated answer.
“You do have the lower state tax [in Texas], but I’ve played in Canada for 14 years [between Vancouver and Calgary from 2010-14],” he said. “I’m from [Toronto], and my wife’s family is from close to here. There’s also a tax when you leave Canada to become a U.S. citizen — there’s a departure tax to leave Canada.”
Avoiding that deemed depositions tax — accrued when a Canadian permanently relocates elsewhere — showed a glimpse into Tanev’s financial savvy, and illustrated how, just like when he’s patrolling the Leafs’ blue line, he is constantly trying to stay in front of the competition.
“He’s a stud back there,” forward Matthew Knies said. “I think he’s always watching. He’s thinking ahead, making the play and getting the puck out of his own zone, and blocking shots. That’s what it takes to win.”
It’s boring, almost, to watch Tanev in action. He’s so rarely out of position or causing cringe-worthy turnovers that have poisoned playoff runs for Toronto in the past. There’s a self-assurance to Tanev that radiates as part of his personality.
“[He’s a] calming presence,” Marner said. “If anyone knows him off the ice, he’s one-of-a-kind, he’s very calm and to himself. Every once in a while you’ll hear him make a joke, which is usually pretty funny.”
What is no laughing matter is how critical Tanev is to Toronto’s hope of denying the Panthers another Cup Final appearance — and attempting to make one of their own. The Leafs held a 2-0 series lead over Florida before the Panthers defended home ice with a pair of victories to pull even at 2-2. When the puck drops on Game 5 in Toronto, it’s officially a best-of-three, though the Leafs still have home-ice advantage to work with there.
To finish the job, the Leafs will take everything Tanev can give — but they can’t afford to lose him in the process, either. There was a collective inhale when Tanev exited Game 3 for several shifts after a shot block; turns out, it was only a broken skate.
“Frustrating,” according to Tanev, to even miss a few minutes at this time of year when his contributions are critical.
“He’s done this for a long time,” said Berube, on Tanev’s refusal to shy away from harm. “So, I’m not going to talk to him about changing.”
Toronto wouldn’t dream of it. Tanev is leading by example on what it takes to truly be all-in. If the rest of Tanev’s teammates follow suit, there’s no telling how far Toronto can take their postseason run.
“He’s as tough as they come,” McCabe said of his partner. “He’s so steady. He’s willing to do whatever it takes to win. We’re lucky to have him.”
After an entertaining Week 0 appetizer and a smattering of games Thursday and Friday, it’s time for Week 1 of the college football season to finally kick off. And the game to start off the first full Saturday of the season couldn’t be much better.
It’s the Texas Longhorns vs. the Ohio State Buckeyes. It’s the No. 1 and No. 3 teams in the preseason AP poll facing off. It’s a College Football Playoff rematch and Arch Manning’s first major test as starter against the defending national champions.
Needless to say, it’s going to be good.
We’ll be keeping track of Texas-Ohio State — and any other notable happenings that might pop up — as the college football season returns. Here’s everything that’s going on across Week 1 in college football:
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Ryan McGee
“Appreciate you, young man.”
With all due respect to “Not so fast, my friend,” those aren’t the words that first come to my mind when I think of Lee Corso, who will be making his final “College GameDay” appearance Saturday at Ohio State. Instead, it’s that first sentence. Because those are the first words I ever heard from Coach. Well, the first I heard in person.
By the time he said that to me, on Saturday, Oct. 1, 1994, I had already heard him say so many words, but always through a television speaker. I had been watching him on ESPN for seven years. When “College GameDay” debuted Sept. 5, 1987, I was a high school student living in a college-football-crazed house in Greenville, South Carolina. My father was an ACC football official, and my role at the house was to get up Saturday mornings and make sure the VCR was rolling on Dad’s game that day so he could break down the film when we got home from church on Sunday.
Then, what to my wondering eyes did appear but a new ESPN studio show, previewing all of the day’s college football games, including wherever Pops might be with his whistle. It was called “College GameDay,” and that night in the same studio, the crew was back with highlights of all those games. It was hosted by Tim Brando, whom we knew from “SportsCenter,” with analysis provided by human college football computer Beano Cook and … wait … was that the guy who used to coach at Indiana? The last time we saw him, wasn’t he coaching the Orlando Renegades to a 5-13 record during the dying days of the USFL?
Brando tells the story of Corso’s ESPN audition, how the then-52-year-old looked at his would-be broadcast partner and said, “Sweetheart, I’m here for the duration. This show is going to be the trigger for your career and my career. I’m going to be the Dick Vitale of college football. Football doesn’t have one. And this show is going to be my vehicle.”
That vehicle shifted into drive and stayed there, even as “College GameDay” remained parked in Bristol, Connecticut. Eventually, Brando moved on and wunderkind Chris Fowler took over as host. They were joined by former running back Craig James, who was nicknamed the “Pony Patriot” because of his college tenure at SMU and his NFL stint in New England. But that’s not what Coach called him. He addressed James as “Mustang Breath.”
That was the formative years “GameDay” lineup I consumed so hungrily during my college days in Knoxville, Tennessee. My roommates and I rose groggily on Saturday mornings to see whether Corso picked our Vols to win that day before stumbling out the dorm doors to grab a cheeseburger and head to the Neyland Stadium student section. If he said Tennessee was going to win, we declared him a genius. If he said the Vols were going to lose, we would scream, “What the hell do you know?! You only lasted one year at Northern Illinois!” That night, pizza in hand, we would watch him on the scoreboard show and again shout at the television. It was either “Spot on, Coach!” or “Hey, Coach, not so fast, my friend!”
Those were the autumns of the early 1990s. Just as Coach had predicted, “College GameDay” had indeed been a trigger. And he indeed was becoming the face of the sport he loved so much. At home, we could feel that love because we recognized it. We loved college football, too. Whether Corso picked your team or not, his passion for the sport was indisputable. That created a connection. Like seeing the same friends every Saturday, the ones whose season tickets have always been next to yours. Or the tailgater who has always parked in the spot next to you, offering up a beer and a rack of ribs. Or the guy you happen to meet as you are both bellied up to a sports bar on Saturday to watch college football games. All of them.
In a business full of phony, Lee Corso has always been the genuine article. And in a world full of awful, Lee Corso has always been fun. All at once so irresistibly relatable but also larger than life.
So, now, imagine my through-the-looking-glass moment of that first time I heard him speak to me directly. That October Saturday in 1994. I was an entry-level ESPN production assistant, barely one year out from those dorm days at Tennessee. I was also barely five years from bowls of cereal back in our Greenville family room, labeling a VHS tape for my father while watching Corso break down what he thought might happen in Dad’s game.
“Appreciate you, young man.”
My assignment that day was to cut and script a highlight of my alma mater as the Vols hosted No. 19 Washington State. The headliner play was a long touchdown run by wideout Nilo Silvan on a reverse pitch from some kid named Peyton Manning. But the quiet play that really handed the Vols the upset was a fourth-down conversion early in the fourth quarter, when a 1-yard Manning run earned the first down by barely an inch, all while still in Tennessee territory. That set up a field goal that ended up sealing the 10-9 win.
Back then, every ESPN highlight was produced in a converted basement room crammed with tape machines and filled with the noise of 20-somethings like me, scrambling in and out of the edit rooms that lined what we called “screening.” When you were done piecing together your one-minute tape and scribbling out a handwritten script, you ran out of that edit room and down the hallway to the tape room and TV studio to deliver it all.
As we were about to pop my Tennessee-Wazzu tape for the delivery dash, the door to our edit suite opened. It was Lee Corso. Without us knowing it, he had been watching through the window to see what plays we had included in our highlight. Without saying a word, he pointed at my script — called a “shot sheet” — and motioned for me to hand it to him. He read it, flipped it around so it was facing me and used his finger to tap the box describing that decidedly nonsexy fourth-quarter fourth-down conversion.
“Appreciate you, young man.”
Then he continued.
“I came down here to make sure you had this play in there. That was the play of the game. If we hadn’t had that play in this highlight for me to talk about, then I would have looked like a dummy. And I don’t need any help in that department, do I?”
He squeezed the shoulders of my editor, the guy at the wheel of the machinery.
“I appreciate you, too.”
Then he walked out into the furious racket of screening and shouted through the aroma cloud of sweat and pizza, “How we doing, troops!”
Someone shouted back, “How was Nebraska, Coach?” A reminder that this was the first year that “College GameDay” had hit the road. They went out once in 1993, to Notre Dame, as a test. It went well, so they were headed out six times in 1994. Just two weeks earlier, they had gone to Lincoln, the show’s third-ever road trip.
He replied: “Lot of corn and big corn-fed dudes!”
Another shout: “You excited about going to Florida State-Miami next week, Coach?”
“Let’s hope it goes better than when I played there!” A reminder that the Florida State defensive back they called the “Sunshine Scooter,” who held the FSU record for career interceptions (14) for decades, was a career 0-2 against the Hurricanes in Miami.
Before Coach scooted back down the hall to the studio, he said it again. This time to the entire room of kids desperately trying to find their way in the TV sports business.
“I appreciate y’all!”
That was more than three decades ago. And whenever I recall that story, it is echoed back to me by every single person who was in that screening room with me back in the day. And the people who first went out on the road with “College GameDay” in the mid-1990s. And the people who are out there with the show today.
In so many cases, it’s the same people. Jim Gaiero, the current producer of “GameDay,” was also down in screening back in the day. The group that produced the incredible “Not So Fast, My Friend” ESPN documentary was led by a handful of Emmy Award-winning feature producers who also were down in the pit, and also were recipients of so many “appreciate you”s.
It is impossible to measure the impact of someone like Corso, the face of his sport, taking those moments to encourage, to mentor, and to, yes, coach. That’s not common. But neither is he.
On the morning of the 2024 Rose Bowl, the College Football Playoff semifinal between Alabama and Michigan, I was sitting with Coach just before he headed out to the “GameDay” set. I shared with him that story from 1994 and told him how much it had always meant to me. He replied: “Winning games is great. But any real coach will tell you that isn’t the best part of the job. It’s watching those that you coached up as kids, seeing them grow into adults, have great jobs and raise great families. That’s why you do it.”
Lee Corso spends every Saturday surrounded by those he has coached. And that’s why it has been and will be so hard to say goodbye. It’s why there was never an icicle’s chance in Phoenix that Corso was going to be off the show after he suffered a stroke. It’s why he was still part of the show in 2020, when COVID-19 had him stuck at home in Florida as the rest of the crew was back on the road. It’s why he has been on the show ever since it was born, even as it has grown from a few guys in a studio to a few dozen fans behind the stage on the road to the rock concert circus caravan that it is today. Exactly what Coach believed it could be when he showed up for that first audition 38 years ago.
Love. That’s why.
You see it in the eyes of those who work on the show. The way they look out for him. The way they still hang on every word he says. We all see it very publicly when we watch Kirk Herbstreit. It’s hard to remember when we see the current Herbie, the father-of-four statesman of the sport, but when he first joined “College GameDay” in 1996, he had just turned 27, less than four years out of Ohio State. When Kirk posts those early Saturday morning videos of Coach sharing a story or Coach pulling a prank or Coach cracking himself up as he tries to figure out how to navigate an overly complicated escalator, we all feel that. Just as we have felt that since the first countdown to the first “College GameDay” on Sept. 5, 1987.
Not so fast? It has gone by too fast. But what a friend.
Appreciate you, Coach.
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