Maple Leafs Visit Matthew Mayich in Arizona, Wear MM27 at Mullett Arena

The Maple Leafs visited Matthew Mayich before practising at his rink

Before the Maple Leafs took the ice at Mullett Arena on Saturday morning, the entire team went to see Matthew Mayich and his family. The Arizona State defenceman collapsed on August 20 and remains hospitalized. Toronto's players and staff visited, brought a signed team jersey and other gifts, and then practised at Arizona State's home rink wearing custom grey T-shirts bearing a drawing of Mayich's face over a large No. 27, and navy hats marked "MM27" with a yellow ribbon.

It was the kind of detour that does not appear on an itinerary. The Leafs were in Arizona for a three-day team-bonding trip, the last stop before flying home Sunday ahead of Tuesday's season opener against Montreal. The Mayich visit was the part of the weekend the players talked about afterward.

What happened to the Arizona State defenceman

Mayich collapsed on August 20. He remains in hospital. Arizona State's hockey program and the broader college hockey community have rallied around him in the weeks since, and out of respect for his family we are not going to speculate beyond what has been confirmed publicly.

Arizona State's programme is one of the newer Division I operations in American college hockey, and Mullett Arena, which opened in 2022, is its first purpose-built home. It is a tight, loud building that seats a few thousand people. Everyone in that room knows everyone.

What is clear is how far the story travelled. Mayich is a college defenceman, not an NHL player, and a professional team two time zones and one international border away reorganized a morning around him. When news of his collapse broke in late August, it registered across the sport.

MM27 at Mullett Arena

The tribute was specific rather than generic, which is what made it land. The shirts carried Mayich's likeness and his number. The hats carried his initials, his number, and a yellow ribbon. Toronto wore them at Mullett Arena — Arizona State's building, the rink where Mayich plays his home games — rather than at a neutral facility.

Matthew Knies, who is from Phoenix, said the team brought the family a signed jersey and other gifts during the visit. Knies and Auston Matthews are the two Arizona natives on the roster, and their presence is the reason the Leafs were in the state at all.

This is worth saying plainly: gestures like this are easy to perform badly. A team photo op with a stricken athlete's family can be worse than nothing. By every account of Saturday, the Leafs did it the right way — privately, in person, with the whole group, and without making themselves the story.

Why Toronto was in Arizona in the first place

The Leafs have run preseason bonding trips before, most often to Muskoka. This year they went south instead, to the home state of their captain and one of their top-line wingers. We covered the reasoning behind the Arizona trip when it was announced: a roster with 11 new faces needed time together somewhere that was not a practice rink in Etobicoke.

That context matters to how Saturday played out. This is a substantially rebuilt team — as many as nine players could make their Maple Leafs debut on opening night — under a first-year general manager in John Chayka and a new head coach in Jim Hiller. Groups like that do not have shared history to fall back on. They have to build some.

Mullett Arena is a small building by professional standards — Arizona State's home rink, and for two seasons the temporary NHL home of the franchise that has since moved to Utah. It is not a place an NHL team practises by accident. Holding the session there rather than at a private facility in Scottsdale was a choice, and the choice was the point.

Hiller, speaking about the trip as a whole, said he thought it was a great trip and that he heard a lot of laughs and saw a lot of smiles. He has been running a camp full of open competitions and hard evaluations for two weeks. A weekend where the hockey mattered less was the point.

The hockey did resume

After the visit, Toronto held its final full practice of the preseason. Nick Paul returned to the ice after leaving Wednesday's preseason game against Ottawa in the second period; he remains day-to-day with an undisclosed injury and Hiller has not committed him to the opening-night lineup. Dakota Joshua, managing a core issue, was a full participant but looked a step slow in places, and Hiller was clear that Joshua is not under pressure to rush back.

The goaltending rotation also got its final tune-up, with Sergei Bobrovsky and Anthony Stolarz splitting work ahead of a season in which Toronto plays 84 games rather than 82. Neither has been named the starter for Tuesday, though Bobrovsky, who signed a three-year deal on July 1, is the presumptive No. 1.

Bo Groulx skated as an extra and rotated onto the top line with Knies, Matthews and Jack Roslovic — a small detail with real implications for who fills the 13th-forward spot. We tracked the Paul and Joshua situations as they developed through the week, and both remain unresolved heading into Monday's 5 p.m. ET roster submission.

The wider point about a team's first week

There is a temptation, in a market as results-obsessed as Toronto, to file a story like this under nice-but-irrelevant. Chemistry does not stop breakaways. A team-bonding trip did not fix the Leafs' goaltending or their cap situation, and nobody involved would claim otherwise.

The counterpoint is that this was not really a chemistry exercise. A team that flies to another country and reorganizes a practice day around a hospital visit is telling its own new players something about the standard of the room they just joined. Eleven of them had no basis for knowing what this organization values. Now they have one data point, and it is a good one.

But the thing that actually gets built on trips like this is the willingness to be uncomfortable together — to say a hard thing in a room in January, to take a hit for a teammate in March. Toronto's roster has 11 people who have never done any of that with each other. A shared Saturday morning in a hospital in Arizona is not a substitute for that. It is a reasonable place to start.

What's next

The Leafs flew home Sunday. Rosters are due to the league by 5 p.m. ET Monday, and the season opens Tuesday at 7 p.m. against the Canadiens at Scotiabank Arena — the seventh straight year the two Original Six clubs have met on opening night.

The 2026-27 season runs 84 games under the new collective bargaining agreement, two more than the old schedule, and it is the franchise's 100th. There will be a great deal of ceremony attached to this year in Toronto. Saturday morning in Arizona was the opposite of ceremony, which is probably why it registered.

Mayich remains in hospital in Arizona. The Leafs will be wearing something else on Tuesday, but the MM27 hats were in the room this weekend, and that is a detail this group is likely to carry further into the season than any line combination it worked on at Mullett Arena.