That's right, the Breadbin opened for business exactly eight days after the Buds were booted out of the 2003-2004 playoffs. So maybe I'm to blame.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that the drought is nearing an end. Next year, they'll be in. Of course, I've said that privately (and, in recent years, publicly) every year. Just as, every year, I've struggled to grade the squad, on account of their remarkable penchant for playing like world-beaters...only after the world has beaten them.
This season, they started their annual charge considerably earlier than usual, not coincidentally right around the time James Reimer showed up and stabilized the goaltending. The entire team responded: they're 24-15-7 in calendar 2011. If only they had played with any sort of consistency through the first three months of the season.
Rather than grade every player, which I did the first few times I performed this labour of Leaf-love, I'll spare my readers total exhaustion and mention some standouts, positive and negative. Before I do that, I'd like to suggest that there is still a whole lot of average on this squad. There's nothing wrong with average: every NHL team has a couple of average players. Properly coached and managed--which generally means "not expected to do too much"--they can be an integral part of a championship run.
The Leafs have too many average players. Burke knows this; when he got here, they were a team composed almost entirely of average players, and they had no prospect depth to boot. The GM done an astonishingly good job of filling the prospect pool, but the NHL team still requires some tinkering. Burke's unenviable job is to assess which merely average players can be safely discarded without killing chemistry.
Take Tim Brent. 8 goals, 12 assists; -4. These are distinctly average stats. But Brent had a habit of coming up big when it counted, never more so than right here:
THIS IS AN AVERAGE PLAYER YOU WANT ON YOUR TEAM
Every Leaf team must have its whipping boy. He's usually a defenseman, occasionally a goaltender; most often he deserves the whips. Not always: Larry Murphy was booed mercilessly in Toronto for reasons that escape me. This is, after all, the same Larry Murphy who won four Cups and was inducted into the Hall of Fame as the fifth-highest scoring defenseman of all time. His only full season in a Leaf uniform saw him put up 61 points. Those are Kaberle numbers, and Kaberle was respected if not revered by most of the Leaf faithful.
This year's boo magnet came over from Detroit last off-season, in what seemed at the time to be a completely superflous signing. Had Burke only known that Lebda--whose name often got transcribed as "Lebad"--would be so colossally inept, he probably would have skated away in the other direction as fast as he could. I mean, it takes a considerable amount of suckitude to be -3 in a game your team WINS 9-3.
Jonas Gustavsson, also known as "The Monster"...wasn't one, not this year. His recurring heart trouble obviously affected his play almost as much as his waning confidence. It would be folly to give up on Gus just yet, but the play of Reimer has relegated Jonas to an afterthought.
The Leafs came within a Mikhail Grabovski goal of joining the Anaheim Ducks as the only NHL team with three 30-goal scorers. It was a given that Kessel would snipe thirty (and for those of you still stuck on the huge price Burke paid for Kessel, consider that he is the youngest NHLer to have scored thirty or more goals in three consecutive seasons). But Nikolai Kulemin's 30 was unexpected and I doubt many people pencilled Grabo in for 29 after he could have been traded for a bucket of pucks last year. Clarke MacArthur almost tied Kessel for the team lead in scoring, and hands up all none of you who saw THAT coming. It sets up a pretty little conundrum. If you're Brian Burke, do you gamble that Kulemin, Grabovski and MacArthur can surpass their career years? That's not a bet I'd take. But which one is expendable in a package that could get you the legitimate #1 center this team so desperately needs?
On defense, behold Luke Schenn, the beast who led the entire NHL in hits by defensemen. Regard the recently rejuvenated Dion Phaneuf, who grabbed the captain's reins and ran with them only after Kaberle was traded. And get a load of Keith Aulie, the rook who was routinely putting up 20+ minutes a night against the opposition's top lines. A puckmover to replace Kaberle, plus the deletion of Komisarek and Lebda, would make this defence top five in the league.
And what can you say about James Reimer. First Leaf rookie goalie to 20 wins since Jiri Crha in 1980. If he doesn't suffer from Toscroft syndrome, in which a first year goalie stuns the league only to transform into a sieve in ensuing seasons...then maybe we can start beLeafing again.
Final note on the coaching. I still don't like Ron Wilson and I'm not sure he is the correct coach for this group. No matter; he will be retained. Regardless, Keith Acton, who is supposedly in change of the joke the Leafs call special teams, needs to go. Yesterday wouldn't be soon enough. The final game of the season epitomized the Leafs this past year, and explained in a nutshell why they're not joining the dance tomorrow night. The Canadiens had two power plays and scored on both; the Leafs had five, and the only goal scored on any of them was scored by Montreal.
And so, another year without playoffs. Hopefully the last one for a while. As they say in Toronto, Go(lf) Leafs Go(lf)!
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NOTE TO READERS: My sincere apologies for the upcoming dry spell. Eva is PVRing the political debate tomorrow night for me (I'll be--where else?--at work); I hope to get to blogging about it on Wednesday. Between this Thursday and next I expect to be pretty much living at Price Chopper/FreshCo...the Breadbin will most likely be empty.
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