Mitch Marner ‘never protected’ by Maple Leafs, agent says

Marner’s agent, Darren Ferris, took some time Wednesday to rehash some of the conversations around his departure and what led to the star leaving his hometown team.

“As time went on, Mitch became the focus of everything. Scrutinized for every game, him and his family criticized after every loss. At points, receiving threats on social media, which was disturbing. I received plenty of disparaging comments and misguided reports myself. There was a hysteria,” Ferris said in an appearance on the PuckPedia Hockey Show.

“You gotta remember, Mitch was carjacked in Toronto. Every year the team came up short, he was the one singled out… This is a guy that had the most playoff points on the team, who played through a fractured ankle in the Boston series. He really bled for that team and he was never protected by his organization, in my opinion.”

Over his nine years with the Maple Leafs, Marner finished with 63 points (13 goals, 50 assists) in 70 post-season games, but is already outpacing that production after his lone run with the Golden Knights, putting up 29 points (10 goals, 19 assists) in 22 games en route to a Stanley Cup Final appearance.

A native of Markham, Ont., Marner never advanced past the second round of the playoffs in those nine years with his hometown Maple Leafs.

However, Ferris revealed that issues between the player and team rose to the surface much sooner than the duo’s final playoff disappointment — a second-round defeat to the Florida Panthers in 2025.

“Right from the get-go. I think people think this whole story with Mitch started with his contract dispute originally or that negotiation, and that’s not really where it started,” Ferris said. “I mean, back when he first signed with the Leafs and his entry-level (contract), they did not want him to have performance bonuses in there.”

Then came Marner’s contract negotiation in 2019, which bled into training camp before he finally put pen to paper on a six-year, $65 million deal in September.

“To this day, people say he didn’t show up for training camp. Well, he did. He didn’t miss a day of training camp … He’s never ever held out from a camp,” Ferris said of that dispute. “So there was a lot of misinformation, which just kept spiralling into a lot of information that just made him the villain here in the city.”

Ferris, who has represented Marner since his days in junior hockey, also took the time to touch on his final season in Toronto, when his time with the team looked to be nearing an end, and then-general manager Brad Treliving began floating the two-time all-star’s name in trade talks.

It was reported that the Leafs had put together a potential deal with the Carolina Hurricanes that would’ve sent Mikko Rantanen to Toronto. Marner, who had a no-trade clause, reportedly declined the deal, but Ferris said that the relationship between player and team was soured from that point on.

“Much was made of the Carolina proposal that Brad Treliving put in front of him. Nobody had the real information that was out there. There was never a trade in place; it was just a suggestion put to Mitch — would he go to Carolina if a trade would be consummated?” Ferris said, mentioning that Marner didn’t like the timing of the deal because his wife was pregnant at the time and he didn’t want to uproot the family while that transpired.

“That Carolina thing … I don’t think helped the situation, and I think there was no real effort by the organization to rectify any of the concerns.”