What a season Mitch Marner is having. If you want to present him as a real Hart Trophy candidate, you will have no hesitation on my part. He was a virtuoso, as we all saw on Sunday when he took the Toronto Maple Leafs on the back with a two-goal effort against the Utah Hockey Club.

Tied for 12^th in the NHL in points. Second in the NHL in assists per 60 at 5-on-5. Top 15 in 5-on-5 points per 60. First in the NHL in takeaways. Quickly, Brad Treliving: extend the young man before it’s too late.

*listens to earphone*

Wait…I’m told these are Marner’s stats for 2022-23. It turns out we’ve experienced these heroic acts before.

Did you know that I annoy you at first glance? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. Marner’s 2024-25 season has been magical so far. He’s as responsible as any Leaf for leading the team to a 7-1-0 record since Auston Matthews went down with an upper-body injury. During that eight-game stretch, Marner had seven multi-point efforts. Going into Sunday night’s games, he was tied for 10th.^th in the NHL in terms of scoring. He led the NHL in power play assists. The Leafs’ vastly improved penalty kill ranked sixth in the league in efficiency, and Marner led all Toronto forwards in shorthanded minutes played per game. He once again leads the NHL in takeaways. Of the 170 forwards who have played at least 250 minutes at 5-on-5 this year, only one allows fewer high-danger chances than Marner when he’s on the ice.

If the Professional Hockey Writers Association voted for MVP today, Marner would deserve negative votes – at worst. He has been a horse of heart and soul, in all situations, at his best when his team, which currently has six regular forwards on injured reserve, needs him most.

No one can take away this tremendous quarter of a season from Marner, who was the most talked about trade candidate of the offseason despite controlling his destiny with a no-move clause.

But there seems to be a temptation in current hockey discourse, online, offline and on the airwaves, to filter Marner’s incredible play in 2024-25 through the prism of his upcoming contract negotiation. Is it time to extend Marner now before his price explodes as an unrestricted free agent next summer? If William Nylander signed an eight-year pact with an $11.5 million AAV, Marner worked his way into something starting with 12, and an MVP-level campaign would propel that number even higher into the stratosphere… isn’t it?

Perhaps according to Marner’s camp, including his father Paul and his agent Darren Ferris. They’d be crazy not to try to leverage Marner’s play this season into a contract.

But the truth? Absolutely nothing has changed. No questions were answered about Marner and what he means for the Leafs long term.

The reasons are twofold. The first is a compliment: this sequence of elite play from Marner, as I mentioned at the top of this column, is not new. Not by far. Prior to this season, Marner was a two-time first-team All-Star at right wing and a one-time Selke Trophy finalist. He had finished in the top four in the NHL in assists four times and points twice. He currently ranks ninth among all active NHL players in career points per game, between Evgeni Malkin and Mikko Rantanen. Since Marner’s NHL debut in 2016-17, only five players have had more assists. By the end of this season, he will rank among the top five scorers in Maple Leaf franchise history.

Particularly given his excellent defensive work, Marner is one of the best versatile right wingers of his generation. He’s on a Hall of Fame trajectory. This was as true three years ago as it is today.

Second: Whether you’re a Leafs fan, just live in Toronto, or cover the team, you know the drill: Wake us up in April. This applies to the Leafs as a whole; although they have made extremely promising progress as a defensive team and in the crease year after year under new coach Craig Berube, none of that matters yet for a team with one playoff victory since 2004, a team that is 0-6 as a winner. -Games to go during the Matthews/Marner years. The Leafs of this era have reached the point where they will only be judged by what they accomplish in the playoffs. Individually, Marner embodies that struggle as much as any Leaf. His smart 200-foot game just hasn’t translated into the trench warfare of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, especially deeper in the playoffs when Toronto plays in do-or-die games. Over the past five seasons, in Games 5, 6 and 7 of a series, Marner has no goals and five points in 16 games.

This is definitely not the case hurt Marner’s future is that he has been such a world beater so far this season. But that doesn’t change anything about his future either. In other words: he I shouldn’t change anything for Leafs management, and they would be wise to not let Marner’s October and November tempt them into trying to extend his contract early. A minimum of $12 million will be a lot to commit if he continues to ghost in the playoffs. Depending on how the rest of the year goes, would you rather put that money aside to pursue two of Sam Bennett, Aaron Ekblad and Nikolaj Ehlers, for example? Maybe, maybe not, but that’s not a decision to make right now.

Marner has always been an elite player in the regular season. We won’t know if he’s truly a changed man, and if that fateful off-season coffee meeting with Berube lit a new spark, until Toronto’s backs are against the wall this spring. If Marner combines the same talent, leadership and determination he demonstrates now, he will rewrite his history. But not before or unless that happens.