It’s late March, and Matt Murray is taking part in his first practice of the 2023-24 season with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
It’s a small step on the long road back to an NHL crease.
Murray underwent bilateral hip surgery in October that will sideline him for the entire regular season. But he’s continued to work to hopefully put himself in position to be, at the very least, a break-in-case-of-emergency No. 4 goaltending option for the Leafs in the playoffs.
On Friday, he got in his first full practice with the team. The next step in his recovery would be for him to get game action with the Toronto Marlies on a conditioning stint.
The @MapleLeafs have assigned goaltender Matt Murray to the @TorontoMarlies on an LTIR conditioning loan.
— Leafs PR (@LeafsPR) April 13, 2024
Despite not being able to play this season, Murray never disappeared from the Leafs.
Even before he returned to practice, he remained on the outskirts of the team. He attended meetings and greeted teammates in the dressing room after wins. He poked his head out of the gym at the practice facility and watched his teammates on the ice. His stall at the practice facility was never emptied. His gear sat there, waiting for him to return.
“I really admire the way he just comes in every day and he works,” Auston Matthews said recently.
Murray has been resolved to control what he can while navigating a steady stream of adversity, on the ice and, more devastatingly, off of it following two Stanley Cup wins with the Pittsburgh Penguins in his first two NHL seasons.
“I just wake up every day and try to have a plan for what I want to do,” Murray said. “You’re gonna have ups and downs. You’re gonna have adversity. Injuries especially are part of the game. Sometimes, it can be hard to avoid.”
Murray is in the final year of his contract with the Maple Leafs. His NHL future is uncertain, but the story of his journey through personal tragedy, injuries, and an attempt at reinvention in the crease is not finished being told.
Matt Murray is unlike most NHL players.
He’s a devoted learner with a genuine interest in history and world affairs. He listens to podcasts like The Daily, Breaking Points, and PBD to stay up to date on current events. He always has his head buried in a book, reading everything from the fiction of Jack Carr to Mark Greaney’s “Gray Man” series to “The Creature from Jekyll Island,” a work about the history of the Federal Reserve.
“I definitely have a curious mind, I would say,” Murray said. “I like looking into things that I don’t know about and learning. What’s fun for me is learning new stuff.”
Murray enjoys his time in nature. He’s taught himself to fish and has come to enjoy camping. He can throw up a tent with ease. He plays the piano, according to Zach Aston-Reese, a former teammate with the Penguins and Leafs.
Tall and thin, Murray has always looked older than he was. He can come across that way, too.
“It seemed like he had been around for a while,” Marc-Andre Fleury recalled of Murray’s early years in Pittsburgh. “A very calm guy, poised, kind of quiet I would say.”
Adam Francilia, Murray’s personal goaltending coach, says he has a “really well-developed worldview.” The two will engage in deep conversations which have nothing to do with hockey. “Farming on a microscale and that kind of thing.”
Standard stuff.
“He’s very much into holistic health and nutrition and that type of thing, so he and I get into that pretty good,” Francilia says. “It’s a really healthy part of him that he likes to learn about and explore.”
Murray thinks he got his curious side from his mother, Fenny. If he wasn’t playing hockey, though, Murray thinks he might have become a lawyer, just like his father, James, who passed away suddenly in January of 2018 when Matt was 23.
James Murray studied law in Toronto, served as a deputy judge in small claims court, lectured at Lakehead University, and practiced in Thunder Bay.
Murray looked up to his dad – the way he went about his work and life. And, even now, he still might pursue his law degree and become a lawyer one day.
He recalls that his father started off as a criminal defence attorney before “maybe making up for his criminal defence days” by working in child protection services with a family care facility in Thunder Bay called Dilico. The kind of noble, if heavy and demanding, work that really mattered.
Murray admired it.
“He didn’t really talk much about it,” Murray said of his father’s work. “Typical lawyer stuff, I think. You’re not really allowed most of the time. And obviously when I was young he probably didn’t want to bother me with it, so we didn’t talk much about it.”
What Murray saw in his father was a “very fair-minded individual.” Someone with a strong moral compass. Murray remembers the day he went with his dad to court for take-your-kids-to-work day when he was in the eighth grade. James was a judge by then and proceeding over small claims court.
One case from that day still sticks in Murray’s mind. One friend was suing another for taking his trailer.
What Murray remembers most is the way his father resolved the case. “He never really leaned one way or the other,” Murray said. “Just always made the right down-the-middle choice and kept both sides (in mind).
“That was the one thing I remembered is both sides were like, ‘Yeah, that’s fair.’”
“I know that meant a lot to Matt for sure, what his dad was doing,” Francilia said. “Matt has a tremendously high sense of justice… He does not like to see anybody being wronged.”
“I don’t know if I necessarily (have) a perfect moral compass like he had,” Murray said of his late father. “But I try to see (things) pretty objectively. That’s key and something he did for sure — had to.”
Matt Murray won the Stanley Cup twice with the Penguins. (Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
Once the goalie of the present and future with the Penguins, someone who had emerged almost out of nowhere to help the franchise to Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017, Murray was scuffling through injuries and inconsistency in what would ultimately be his final season in Pittsburgh when he met Francilia in 2019-20.
A do-it-all development guru, Francilia first started counseling goalies when James Reimer approached him one summer years ago in B.C. Francilia happened to be in Pittsburgh visiting one of his other clients, then-Penguins defenseman Justin Schultz, when Murray hustled over to introduce himself.
Francilia had long been fascinated by the goaltending position and has worked with everyone from Reimer to Connor Hellebuyck, Mike Smith, Frederik Andersen, Martin Jones and Devan Dubnyk. Goalies, he believed, played an entirely different sport from their teammates. He likened the position to martial arts, for the Zen it seemed to demand.
Watching Schultz play defence for the Penguins over the years, Francilia couldn’t help but notice some things about Murray, who had fallen on hard times and lost his place in the organization’s future.
“Do you want me to show you or just explain a couple things that I’m seeing?” Francilia asked Murray the day they first met.
Francilia is reluctant to dive into too much detail about what he believed was ailing Murray, who was dealt to the Ottawa Senators in the fall of 2020 before being traded once again to the Leafs in the summer of 2022.
From the sounds of it, Murray felt like his body wasn’t working as one connected unit.
Francilia will say that the feeling of disconnection Murray had been experiencing was caused by what he describes as “structural deficiencies” in the way he was moving and playing goal. “Too much rigidity,” in his estimation.
This meant Murray’s Gumby-like body — long and lanky at 6-foot-5 and 203 pounds — wasn’t working as one. The parts were operating independently of one another.
With Francilia’s help, Murray has been trying to restructure his body “to enable him to have a much more fluid and well-balanced stance and foundation” so that “he’s able to stay structured over and on top and connected to the game.”
As to how that’s different from his more successful early years in the NHL, Murray says it’s simply about trying to make better decisions. It’s breaking out of his own “default” settings.
Getting to that point — where “I don’t have to think about it; I just do it” — takes thousands of repetitions, which explains why, among other reasons, Murray continued to struggle in Ottawa even after their work had begun. He didn’t get all the way there in Toronto either, though there were hints of progress: Murray started 7-1-2 for the Leafs last season, with a .926 save percentage.
Injuries have forced the reinvention process to start and stop and start, again and again.
Murray’s chances of returning in the playoffs from this latest injury are slim. But not quite zero either.
A return to the Leafs next season isn’t out of the realm of possibility, however, as a No. 3 or 4 option in the team’s system. Murray could continue his journey back to the NHL from there.
Murray celebrated his second Stanley Cup with his dad only seven months before he lost him, the highest of highs in his professional life followed soon after by the lowest of lows in his personal life.
James spurred Murray’s interest in hockey. He was a lifelong Leafs fan who took Murray to his first game for the team he would eventually play for. He shuttled him to Toronto every summer to work with a goalie coach named Jon Elkin starting when he was 10.
“How do you really describe someone in such a short (way)?” Murray said when asked about his dad.
Those close to Murray say it took him time to work out his father’s passing.
“One thing about Mur is, good or bad, he’s very honest about things to people he trusts,” Francilia said.
That “self-honesty” helped Murray acknowledge when he was doing well and not so well.
“I think anyone who goes through it could tell you the same thing,” Murray said. “You just learn to manage it. You learn a lot from it. I think you grow a lot from it. You find people that you can lean on. Just try to surround yourself with good people.”
Said Francilia: “He obviously went through something very young, losing his father. That can absolutely tank you as a person. Or you can deal with it and mature from it. And he obviously did the latter.”
(Top photo: Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)
