TEMPE, Ariz. — By the time the Toronto Maple Leafs step onto the ice at Mullett Arena on Saturday afternoon, the desert will already have done part of the work GM John Chayka wanted it to do.

The annual Muskoka trip is gone. In its place is a short, tightly packed bonding weekend in the captain’s backyard: golf on Friday, dinner at Auston Matthews’ house, staff hosted by Chayka at his own Arizona place, then one practice at the former home of the Arizona Coyotes before the group flies home Saturday night.

“Just a new year, fresh start, wanted to do something different,” Chayka said this week. MLSE president and CEO Keith Pelley had floated the idea that Muskoka, for all the tradition, had started to feel familiar. Arizona offered weather, space and, more importantly, a home that already belongs to the room. Matthews grew up a Coyotes fan in Scottsdale. Matthew Knies is from Phoenix. Chayka still has a residence here from his years running the Coyotes. The Leafs are not pretending this is a coincidence.

And Matthews did not hide how he felt about it. 

“I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “There’s time between now and the first game, so getting away and doing something as a team is important. I’m definitely not complaining. It’s in my hometown.”

Chayka framed it the same way. 

“It’s meaningful to Auston: hometown. This is all about getting to know each other better and spending meaningful time together. So, for him, it’s an opportunity to show guys where he grew up and what he means to the community there.”

Jim Hiller, who has spent camp trying to stitch a roster with more than 10 new faces into something that looks like a team, was not interested in the optics debate about flying five hours so close to opening night. “You might say, ‘ahh, Arizona, that’s so far,’” the Maple Leafs head coach said this week. “Our captain lives there and I know he has some plans for the guys. The weather’s pretty good. We’ll take it, enjoy it, and the positive that comes with it.”

Those plans include the dinner at Matthews’ place. PTO defenceman Nick Blankenburg made the trip. So did Nick Paul, who remains day-to-day and whose availability for Tuesday’s regular season opener against the Montreal Canadiens is still unclear. Same goes with Dakota Joshua, who is nursing a core injury. The group that practised in Etobicoke before departure was already starting to look like an opening-night skeleton: Knies with Matthews and Jack Roslovic; Gavin McKenna with John Tavares and William Nylander; Jake McCabe with Chris Tanev; Morgan Rielly with Darren Raddysh.

Saturday’s skate at Mullett is the public piece. The Leafs have reached out to what remains of the old Coyotes crowd. Knies, who saw an old youth jersey during media day and said he missed the Coyotes, will skate in a building that used to be the NHL’s most unusual home rink. For a team that spent last season at the bottom of the standings and spent the summer ripping up the front office, the image is useful: new group, old desert rink, captain on home ice, first-overall pick in the middle of it.

Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, on Friday’s 32 Thoughts podcast, said Toronto has “really tried to keep their interest secret” in Columbus Blue Jackets forward Kirill Marchenko, “but it’s kind of seeped out.” 

That is the line that traveled. Friedman listed Montreal, the Islanders, Winnipeg, Boston,  which he said made an offer and potentially Vegas and Seattle as other clubs circling. He also said Columbus does not appear interested in a futures-heavy return. Marchenko, 26, is a 6-foot-3 winger who has scored at least 21 goals in four straight seasons, put up 27 and 67 points last year, and carries a $3.85 million cap hit in the final year of his deal before restricted free agency. The fit question in Toronto is not whether the skill would play. It is what it would cost in players and what the next contract would look like on a roster already pressed against the cap after a summer of additions.

That is why the Matthew Knies talk never quite dies. It is not front-burner business. TSN’s Darren Dreger has said as much: the Leafs are not shopping him, but other managers keep circling back to a 23-year-old power forward on a $7.75 million deal through 2030-31.

Chayka’s public position has been consistent since June. Knies, he said, is “an elite power forward in the prime of his career, at a number that we think allows us to build a great team around him.” Moving him would require a haul large enough to make the organization better immediately. Draft-week conversations with Chicago and Dallas never got there. The rumours remain because the player remains valuable, not because the Leafs are packing his stall.

Knies being from Arizona only sharpens the weekend’s contrast. He is on the first line in camp. He is hosting, in a sense, in his own market. And he is still the name that surfaces whenever someone asks how Toronto would ever get a Marchenko-sized piece without breaking the core.

There’s also the fact that Hiller wants to see more from Knies. Is there a clash of system between player and coach?

Chris Tanev left Rochester Institute of Technology after one year as a finance major when Vancouver signed him as an undrafted free agent in 2010. A decade later, during the pandemic, his wife suggested he go back. He transferred credits to Southern New Hampshire University, worked through NHLPA UNLMT, took classes on the road after the kids were in bed, and finished the degree last season.

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