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Brian Burke still upset about funny detail with blockbuster Toronto Maple Leafs trade

Adam Laskaris
Adam Laskaris
|
Jan 20 2025, 9:50 pm
Brian Burke still upset about funny detail with blockbuster Toronto Maple Leafs trade
Sportsnet

In some ways, former Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke has earned a reputation as one of the more progressive voices in hockey.

Burke is currently working as the executive director of the Professional Women’s Hockey League Players Association (PWHLPA), the first-ever employee in that role after a lengthy executive career with six different NHL franchises.

Also a co-founder of the You Can Play initiative that tackles homophobia in sports in honour of his late son Brendan, Burke has never been shy to voice his opinions on just about any topic.

But when it comes to his hockey teams, Burke sometimes had a bit more of an old-school mentality, including when it came to a former Leafs star player.

In an interview with Jeff Marek on The Sheet podcast this week, Burke revealed he’s still ticked off about a trade he made 16 years ago when the Leafs acquired star winger Phil Kessel from the Boston Bruins.

While some people didn’t love the actual process of the trade — Toronto gave up two first-round picks that ended up becoming Dougie Hamilton and Tyler Seguin, two NHL stars in their own right — it was a smaller detail that irked Burke.

In previous stops in Vancouver and Anaheim — including a Stanley Cup win in 2007 — Burke had a policy that he didn’t like players wearing high numbers, usually over 35. However, with Kessel wearing No. 81 in Boston, he opted to take the same number in Toronto, which led to a bit of a domino effect.

“I made the Kessel deal without specifying anything about his number,” Burke explained. “[Mikhail Grabovski’s] agent called me right away and said, you can’t make us take lower numbers if you’re not going to make Kessel take a lower number as well. So I said okay; I gave in. So we had five higher numbers within a week, and still, to this day, burns my ass that we did that.”

However, it seems like Burke might have misremembered the whole story process.

Mikhail Grabovski was already wearing No. 84 in the 2008-2009 season in Toronto prior to the trade. Hockey-Reference also lists 15 different players on that roster having numbers above 35, with Nik Antropov’s No. 80 being the then-highest number before Grabovski. The following season, when Kessel arrived, 15 players also suited up for the Leafs, wearing numbers above 35.

Moreover, the 2007 Ducks team that Burke claimed in the clip had no players with a jersey number over 35 actually had 11 players top that mark, though none higher than 52, and none scored more than Rob Niedermayer’s 16 points that season. So perhaps his policy was actually “no jersey numbers above 35 if you’re a regular player, unless you’re the brother of the team captain Scott Niedermayer.”

In any case, it appears that Burke’s likely lost his case against high numbers being standard in the NHL, with the face of the league in Connor McDavid wearing No. 97 on his back these days.

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