Stream It Or Skip It: ‘All or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs’ on Amazon Prime, An Insider Look at a Dramatic and Heartbreaking Hockey Season

The Toronto Maple Leafs, who take center stage in the latest iteration of Amazon’s inside-look sports documentary series All or Nothing, are one of the National Hockey League’s most storied franchises. They’re also—as this look back on the unusual 2020-21 season demonstrates—possibly the league’s most tortured fanbase. Through five episodes, all of which are available to stream at once, we follow their path through another season of promise and eventual pain.

ALL OR NOTHING: TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A montage of in-game and locker-room shots from the season that was gives way to a heartfelt introduction by actor Will Arnett, a lifelong Toronto Maple Leafs fan who serves as the series’ narrator. Arnett notes how this was going to be the year, until—yet again—it turned out not to be.

The Gist: If you’re not a hockey fan, you might not understand quite what it means to be a Toronto Maple Leafs fan. One of the National Hockey League’s founding “Original Six” franchises, the Leafs are second only to the Montreal Canadiens for championships, having hoisted the Stanley Cup thirteen times. They play in one of the sport’s largest markets, and have one of the biggest, most maniacally-devoted fanbases.

Sounds good, right? Well, here’s the catch: they haven’t won a championship or made the Stanley Cup Finals since the 1966-67 season (the longest drought in the league), and they haven’t even won a playoff series since 2004. The 2020-21 season offered a loaded team with legitimate aspirations of ending these ignominious streaks, and that’s where All Or Nothing picks up with them. The documentary was filmed throughout the season, and is being released as a whole now.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Aside from the obvious parallel to previous seasons of All or Nothing, the most obvious parallel to me was Sunderland ‘Til I Die, which showed a devoted, live-and-breathe-and-die-with-their-team fanbase suffer through a nightmare season.

Our Take: Amazon’s All or Nothing has run more than a dozen seasons since 2016, jumping around from sport to sport, offering insider looks on teams from the NFL, college football, association football, rugby and more. In this latest season, the series makes its first stop in the National Hockey League, and it’s in a season like no other. During the 2020-21 season, the NHL—like sports leagues all around the world—faced the unique difficulties of playing through a pandemic. This is especially difficult in a league that straddles a temporarily-closed national border; in light of quarantine restrictions, the NHL temporarily realigned for the season, keeping the league’s seven Canadian franchises together in the newly-formed “North Division”.

For teams across the league, the season presented challenges. For the Toronto Maple Leafs, it presented an opportunity to seize the moment and finally the historical monkey off their back. After a decade-long fallow stretch, they’ve qualified for the playoffs four seasons in a row, and they’ve added veteran leadership, including center Jon Tavares in 2018 and aging future Hall of Famer Joe Thornton in the offseason. They’ve got the talent and the experience to compete for a Stanley Cup; the only question is if they can harness it and break through the weight of decades of disappointment.

Viewers familiar with previous seasons of All Or Nothing, or perhaps with HBO’s long-running NFL docuseries Hard Knocks, will find a familiar structure to the proceedings here. We’re not just getting games, we’re getting looks inside the locker room, in the front office, and with the players in their off-time. During a pandemic season, this is all the more interesting; the realities of roster management against COVID protocols present a never-before-seen challenge for the team’s leaders; they’ve got to be prepared to replace players on short notice, calling up replacements from the hastily-assembled “taxi squad”, a sort of team-in-waiting instituted in multiple sports during the public health crisis.

I suppose I can call this a spoiler alert, but it’s public knowledge what happens: the Leafs cruise through the regular season, winning the North Division easily and setting up a first-round playoff matchup with arch-rival Montreal. Toronto takes a 3-1 lead in the series, and then… aided by injuries to key Leafs players, the Canadiens surged back and won the series in seven games, adding yet another heartbreak to Toronto’s fans’ collection. Knowing this doesn’t make the series less compelling; rather, seeing it as it happens is fascinating, a painful sense of dramatic irony hanging over the whole thing.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: In a February contest against the Ottawa Senators, the Leafs stake themselves to a comfortable 5-1 lead early, only to see miscues and sloppy play allow the Senators to rally back for a 6-5 overtime win. It’s a clear sign that, for all the high hopes and best intentions that the season started with, there are still flaws that could prove fatal down the line.

Sleeper Star: He’s not exactly a sleeper, per se—he’s the voice of Lego Batman, for crying out loud—but the use of Arnett as a narrator provides an essential human angle to the struggle of the Leafs’ season. No one understands what it’s like better than a fan, and no one can convey the frustration and pain of another disappointing season better.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I grew up a die-hard Leafs fan. For me, dying hard starts with the numbers,” Arnett notes early on, before rattling off the cold statistics of heartbreak. “That’s the thing we always want to come back to. Are we playing with Stanley Cup habits?”, veteran center Jon Tavares notes in an early-season interview.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Whether you’re a die-hard hockey fan looking for a fresh hit of content before the new season starts, or a neophyte looking for a good place to start with the sport, All Or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs is a compelling, entertaining watch.

Unless you’re a Leafs fan. Then it’ll probably just make you mad. (But admit it, you’re still going to watch.)

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and internet user who lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, two young children, and a small, loud dog.

Watch All Or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs on Amazon Prime