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.
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