Sure Glad Eva's Not A Habs Fan

I am on friendly terms with fans of the following teams:

• Montreal Canadiens
• Ottawa Senators
• Boston Bruins
• Washington Capitals
• Colorado Avalance
• New York Islanders
• New Jersey Devils

It's fun razzing the Devs and Isles fans...if only because everyone else razzes me to the dogs and back. Every...damn...year.

Another lost season. When the only thing your team is playing for is to minimize the second of the two first round draft picks Boston so eagerly plucked in exchange for Phil Kessel, it kind of weighs on this fan's spirit.

I'm starting to wonder if the Toronto Maple Leaf franchise has an honest-to-God curse on it. As in witchcraft, sorcery, bad voodoo, what have you. It grows mighty tiresome to watch player after mediocre player leave Toronto to blossom somewhere else; it's even sadder when players who tore up the league as rookies (cf. Phaneuf, Dion) come to Toronto and proceed to fail to live up to even modest expectations.

I'll be giving my annual report card at season's end, but I'll tell you right now there are only three players, to my mind, earning every penny of their paycheques: Grabovski, Kulemin and MacArthur...all keepers. Burke is eager to upgrade the team, and he has no shortage of offers, but the problem is that most if not all of them are for....Grabovski, Kulemin and/or MacArthur. Maybe Burke can pull another hare out of his hat, but this being Toronto, that hare will just end up in the stew by this time next season.

Oh, the vicissitudes of being a Leaf fan.