I can't begin to tell you just how much I am looking forward to the resumption of NHL hockey in T-20 days and counting. This has been a summer of frantic signing, punctuated by a few blockbuster trades. Most teams have come out ahead...or think they have.
I'm not sure what category to put my beloved Buds in. They've certainly been active, picking up Jason Allison, Eric Lindros, Alex Khavanov, Jeff O'Neill, Mariusz Czerkawski and Brad Brown and nudging right up against the hard cap. The rookies good enough to potentially overcome coach Quinn's veteran bias and crack the team out of camp will be up and down between the NHL and the AHL all season: every game Carlo Colaiacovo plays for the Marlies will give the Leafs $2800.00 worth of cap room. They may need that wiggle room come the end of the season, for good or ill. Allison's contract is laden with performance bonuses. Should he stay healthy and contribute, these bonuses will count against the cap. Even if the doomsayers' predictions come to pass and Allison and Lindros collide at center ice, concussing each other and ending each other's seasons sometime around game three, the NHL salary cap is unforgivingly tied to league revenues that might not be as expected. The good news: the NHL has a TV deal in the States, which it didn't have three months ago. The bad news: the network involved is not NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, or ESPN1 or 2...it's the Outdoor Life Network. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. When the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup in '94, the American media enthused that hockey would soon overtake basketball and join the ranks of football and baseball as America's favourite sports. That was back when you'd find one or two hockey articles a year in Sports Illustrated. Now, hockey has joined tractor pulls and 1000-yard staring contests on America's 423rd-largest network, and Sports Illustrated will shelve its Swimsuit Edition before it dares to print a hockey column.
Well, I for one am ready to shelve all this economic, CBA chattering and DROP THE PUCK!
GAME ON!
John Ferguson Jr., the architect of the Maple Leafs this season, has taken a lot of undeserved flak. There is a certain class of nutjob Toronto fan--oddly enough, fans this stupid are usually Leaf fans--who think we can trade Nik Antropov to Pittsburgh and get Sidney Crosby and Marc-Andre Fleury back. Memo to nutjobs: a Doug-Gilmour fleecing comes along once every thirty years or so, league-wide, and we've had ours.
Ferguson has actually done very well working with reality. The reality is that the Leafs have a lot of money tied up in McCabe, Sundin, and (especially) Belfour. Will the naysayers at least concede that this has been money relatively well spent? Sundin has led the Leafs in scoring eight out of the past nine years, McCabe has led the defense corps, and Belfour has exceeded all expectations, including mine.
The biggest knock I keep hearing is that we should have let Belfour go and signed Khabibulin...to save money. Funny, Khabibulin has cashed in on his Cup win and is now making more money than Belfour. While he arguably represents an upgrade on Eddie, is that upgrade worth the added cost?
Seemingly every day over the summer, the Toronto Sun's been agitating, saying this and that player was 'destined' to be a Leaf. Virtually every big-name free agent was linked to the Leafs at some time or another, largely, I suspect, to sell newspapers. All these rumours came to naught, and people were actually disappointed we only managed to get
- a man only three years removed from being a top-five scorer, League-wide;
- a towering player, gifted offensively, who has always yearned to be a Leaf*;
- a former linchpin of the Carolina offense that put the Leafs out of the playoffs not that long ago;
- a top-four defenseman projected for 20 minutes-plus a night
- a sniper who, although streaky and prone to defensive mistakes, was still a driving force of the New York Islanders, not long ago
- a tough, stay-at-home defenseman who has captained the Minnesota Wild
...all this on what amounts to a shoestring budget.
INJURIES
There we go again with the naysaying. And I'll be the first to concede that Lindros and Allison in particular are high-risk. Kind of like Mogilny was. Or Wendel Clark. The laws of probability suggest at least one of our pickups will miss significant time this season. The laws of probability also suggest that at least one of them will remain healthy and put up better numbers than expected. For the money invested, I say the potential reward is worth the risk. You have to remember that NHL players are likely going to be dropping like flies this year, the bitter fruit of a year away from the game. Any player can be hurt at any time. I for one am looking for a playoff berth and possible home-ice advantage.
* I'll stick this 'endnote' here before I move on to League-wide issues. I am not a Lindros fan and never have been. He has always proven himself in my eyes to be a arrogant and conceited momma's boy who can't even remember how to skate with his head up. However, he appears to have grown up and began thinking for himself...I'll reserve judgement.
THE GAME ITSELF promises to be a spectacle this year. I miss the firewagon hockey of the 1980s, when no lead was safe and no deficit was insurmountable. It appears the NHL has missed the run-and-gun game, too. They've promised for the umpteenth time to call the game by the rules, meaning no hooking, hacking, clutching, grabbing, or 'riding'. You're not allowed to impede another player with your stick--every defenseman in the game is going to have to learn a new way to play. I can only hope that this crackdown persists. I don't care if I never see 5-on-5 hockey for the first three months of the season--the obstruction has to go.
(I have doubts that they'll persevere, when some teams get twenty penalties called against them in a game and lose that game 12-1. But if they do...Just think of it! Some teams won't be allowed to pretend they're as good as everyone else!)
This will be the year of Crosby, but also the year of Phaneuf, a monster defenseman from Canada's world junior team; of Wayne Gretzky as a coach, of edge-of-your-seat shootouts to break ties; of excitement. I can't wait.
2 comments:
Go Canucks Go!
Something you didn't touch on, and I know you don't like is something I'm happy to see: the new rule about shootouts deciding tied games. Now, you know I love hockey, I was raised by a hockey trainer, and the game was always on in my house, but I can't watch an unending series of overtimes anymore. The game has a regulation time for a reason, and frankly, if I were to go to Toronto for a game at 7 p.m., I would not want to be driving home at 2 a.m. because the damn thing wouldn't end.
I like shootouts. They pit the best players on each team (goalie and forward) against each other for a decisive one-on-one.
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