Leaf report... for JK

Here we go again... another Toronto Maple Leaf hockey season is upon us, and the obvious question is...  do we have faith?  Well hey faith was made to be broken, so as per usual I'm all in.

I believe i can say with a very sane mind that this team is one of the better ones in recent memory...  not that any Leaf teams in recent memory have set the record books on fire (in a good way), but i like the direction.

A young team gets a bit older, but yet there are decent prospects in the pipe, for the first time in ages there was no overpriced free agent "savior" signing in the off season, only a few decent players with hockey sense and possible upside.

We know that former Leaf Leo Komarov will hit every body in sight, and former Leaf Matt Frattin will do the same and has speed to burn... Mike Santorelli has put up good numbers and i thought had a great season in a disastrous Vancouver Canucks campaign last year.  Daniel Winnik comes from a winning team where he played 76 games, put up 30 points and took only 23 penalty minutes... and he is from Toronto.  It could be that the Leafs 3rd and 4th lines can play hockey and compete with other NHL opponents rather than take a shift here and there to try and intimidate the opponents.  This could be huge... perhaps a line like those could play in the opposing teams end of the ice and wear them down a bit to give some space for the more offensive players.  Remember that scoring goals has not really been a problem for the Leafs, rather the fact that they get scored on more often.  It will be interesting to see what the smaller "spark plug" player Brandon Kozun will bring... he is 24, seems to possess a high hockey IQ,  has speed and skill.  Sometimes smaller players who get overlooked because of their size but have the heart of a lion, can prove to be great assets (see Martin St. Louis).

The absence of a pure enforcer currently on the NHL roster is an intriguing move, and one that might pay dividends... perhaps the Leafs will try to beat the opposition by playing hockey... one can only hope.

Of course as we mentioned before, the Leafs problem has been keeping the puck out of their own net with their patented "fire drill" defensive strategy.  Hopefully the new forwards can help bring a hockey sense supporting roll to getting the puck out of their own end... but what about the defense?

Well Jake Gardiner and Morgan Rielly are a year older, and hey they are dynamite players, perhaps with some proper support they will be able to shine further.  Roman Polak comes from one of the better defensive teams (St, Louis), so at least he has had some experience playing in a successful defensive system.  What about the veteran Stephane Robidas? Perhaps a risk signing given he is 37 years old and coming off 2 bad leg fractures, but i believe his experience, competitive spirit and game smarts are just what the Leafs need if they want to try to turn the way they play defensively around.

Of course it is Toronto and the first mistake made by a player will be front page news, which makes it harder to shake a monkey Omen like that.  If the captain and best player of the Nashville Predators makes a mistake in a game the world goes on, and if Jake Gardiner makes a mistake there will be poles in news stories on how soon should he be traded...  And idiot readers will take the pole and leave their ass brained comments at the bottom of the article under some anonymous name... cause that's how we do it in Toronto.  Remember this is the city that elected Rob Ford, a known partisan buffoon who claimed cyclists who got killed "had it coming" for using roads, and then opposed bike routes, and then got elected.

But i did make a grilled cheese sandwich and one could clearly see the image of the great Johnny Bower making a scintillating save... i was going to put it up on ebay but i was kind of hungry and i realized that if i ate it it might give me the power to "will" the team on to victory this year.  Never take signs that come to you in the form of a grilled sandwich lightly.

This year of course the Leafs are using advanced statistics... it is the way of sports these days and you have to think of the old adage "if you can't beat them then join them".  Hey when a certain player is on the ice our team has the puck a lot more of the time... this is a good thing right?  Sometimes there are blind spots where you like a player, and are blinded to their weakness... but the fact's don't lie.

Say you were a partisan political coach and you believed evolution was a crock, and invading countries to secure Oil was God's work, and in no way was capitalism and industrialization responsible for the decimation of the planet and all those pinko tree huggers are a negative drain on progress.  And say half your team believed that and the other half thought you were a brain dead bigoted loon.   Well you might end up liking the players that shared your views and disliking the ones that didn't (that's how humans work), so perhaps you give more ice time to the players you like and less to those you don't... now perhaps the players that you are playing are not the best for winning hockey games, but you want them to do better so they can make more money to reward them for their belief system.  In your press scrums you sight all kinds of remote bible passages that show that your decisions were the ones that needed to be made and you challenge any opposition to your plan as a terrible unpatriotic bias.

The along comes the stats, that show the players you are choosing for certain situations are not the ones that are yielding the best results... what do you do?  Well i guess if you are a partisan political coach then you immediately challenge scientific method as a biased and erratic measuring stick, run commercials espousing "family values" and eliminate scientific funding... but alas you get the point.

For the record i like Randy Carlyle as a Coach, and in no way am i trying to say he is a partisan political coach... i just pulled an incredibly extreme and hyper hypothetical scenario out of my ass to try and make a point about the value of having a quantitative statistic on players value and considering it in your assessment of how the team plays. Obviously you need gut feelings and the opportunities to allow players to play through slumps and such, but the data doesn't lie... unless you can hire the stats keepers who have no data gathering experience, don't believe in it and just fudge the numbers (it would be like a stepping stone job to minister of finance).

But seriously, lets dream about the best case scenario... dreams should be fun right?
The JVR, Bozak and Kessel line continues to put up "world class" numbers, and the 2nd line of Lupul, Kadri, and Kozun gets even hotter glowing like a Blacksmith's poker in a kiln fire. Now should we have the 3rd line scoring every shift and the 4th line come out and rather than drop the puck the ref just throws it in the opposition net to save time on the clock... It's probably not going to happen like that, but remember we are in the dream part of the story.  It's really not a good dream, because the real excitement comes winning close fought games where big plays are made at both ends of the ice.

Lets get er going...


Projected line up for opening night given injuries and such.

Forwards

James van Riemsdyk -Tyler Bozak - Phil Kessel
Joffrey Lupul - Nazem Kadri - Brandon Kozun
Leo Komarov - Mike Santorelli - David Clarkson
Daniel Winnik - Peter Holland - Matt Frattin


Defenceman

Dion Phaneuf - Stephane Robidas
Jake Gardiner - Roman Polak
Morgan Rielly - Stuart Percy



Golatenders

Jonathan Bernier
James Reimer

 

And so you know i wasn't making up the bit about Johnny Bower making a big save on my Grilled Cheese... don't want anybody to think I'm crazy.

What is cute?

The Yellow Garden spider (Argiope aurantia) was the one that patrolled my fathers garden back in Toronto Canada.  It was a mean looking spider that would bite if disturbed... now i don't ever remember being bitten but i was warned, and knowing that it could was enough for me.  I was also taught that this spider is a great ally for the garden for it's ability to remove pests.

Now there were also a lot of grasshoppers in Toronto... my friend Tom and I called them "clings" because when you caught them they would cling to you and as a defense mechanism would release (or spit) what we called brown junk... seriously. 

One of our favorite pastimes back in those summer days was to catch a grasshopper and throw it into a spider web... it was a grand old time to see the grasshopper struggle in the web and get wrapped up in silk and then bitten causing a final kicking of the leg.  Dad thought that was great too, nature in action, kids on pest control... a good thing for sure. You know grasshoppers are locusts right? They also have ears on their bellies if you want to get into bizarre facts, but the fact is they are garden and plant pests and a wise gardener takes these threats seriously.   So if you are thinking it's mean and evil to kill garden pests then you should go read another blog... back in those days people would douse their gardens with insecticides killing all kinds of beneficial insects and essentially poisoning their food... but they didn't actually kill anything physically with their hands or their feet so in some way were absolved (in their head) of killing.  Most farming now is done on an industrial level and incredible resources go into pest control often at the cost of sustainibility and overall environmental health.  So the person who spends their time physically culling pests is in some way really doing it right.

I learned a lot of things from Dad, some of them i have unlearned, others i have adapted but a staunch opposition to garden pests is one i keep close to my heart.  I was once asked how i could kill slugs by a person who then went and put slug bait killer in her garden.

As you can imagine we had some pretty enormous Yellow Spiders in the garden fed on a steady diet of clings. Kind of a weird thing to have a healthy population of large spiders that bite and then your father sends you out to pick beans for dinner... carefully you move around the garden your hands disturbing the beans to reach under to where the bounty lies... will there be any surprises?

Now there is a serious pest in our neighborhood... a little ass hole squirrel with a stubby tail that just reeks havoc on the local food producing plants.  This bastard will go into a fruit tree grab a fruit, and taker a bite and then drop it on the ground and then grab another fruit and do it again.  It will eat beets and chard and chew new growth off of blueberry plants, but some of the locals think it is fucking cute.  I want that thing dead, but i kind of made a deal that if somebody stopped feeding the squirrels peanuts then i would stop counterattacking.   And in fairness the peanut feeding has stopped and this has made a huge difference to the squirrel's annoying factor.

Anyhoo out in my front yard the bastard started to build a nest in our tree... this cannot happen, so i did what any sane person would do and grab a long bamboo pole, climb the tree and poked that fucking nest down.  I made sure to do it before there were young in the nest as i can just imagine the horror of one of the squirrel friendly neighbors coming by and seeing little baby squirrels hitting the ground like hackey sac's and then looking up to see old man Robertson poking the nest with a long pole.  I though i was being fair.. the nest goes up, the nest comes down, and the squirrel finds a better spot learning that this spot is a very bad spot indeed.  No way does the bastard that ate all of my plums get to have a "safe" home in the view of my relaxing porch... that would be like giving a terrorist an apartment in the Bronx... insane. 

But they are cute and furry and people like them and will defend them to the hilt.  Now I'm sure if a person went into somebodies yard and fucked up their fruit tree there would be a full on hate for that person, i guess the lesson is do it in a squirrel suit and you will be OK. 

I remember at our cottage we had a bluebird nesting box and a family of tree swallows nested it it... it was great watching them until a red squirrel climbed up there and chewed the entrance hole bigger, destroying the nesting box and then ate the birds...  real cute.