Good night: What Burke has joined together let no one tear asunder
(Ed. note: As with Monday night, there were no pictures from this game immediately available, so here’s some crap I made in Photoshop very quickly. Love the smudge.)
The Lead
It’s not very often that the first preseason tilt of a team’s campaign tells pretty much the whole story for the remaining games, but the Toronto Maple Leafs came pretty close tonight against the Boston Bruins.
For one thing, they lost 3-2 and you get the feeling that, given the relative quality of the Leafs’ roster as it’s currently constituted, that seems just about right for the majority of the season, doesn’t it? Not that Brian Burke is at fault in this; he was handed a pretty awful team to begin with and has made some shrewd moves to improve it. Enough to make the playoffs? Probably not. But enough to keep Leafs fans entertained? You know it.
I could watch my team lose a hundred 3-2 games if they were all that entertaining. Lots of fights, lots of big hits, some decent displays of skill at time and, perhaps most importantly, a lot of promise exhibited from the Leafs’ 19-to-23-year-old crowd.
That promise was evident on the game’s opening goal, a gorgeous shorty by Tyler Bozak in which he breezed through Matt Hunwick as though he wasn’t even there then beat Dany Sabourin (I know, I know) up high. Bozak also formed a pretty frightening power play troika with Leafs’ first-round pick Nazem Kadri and Viktor Stalberg. They created a lot of chances and the latter two members of the forward group connected on a second-period goal for Stahlberg to draw the Leafs even 2-all for a while.
And of all the Leafs players, it should be noted that Stalberg, with all due respect to Kadri, left the most lasting impression. I saw him play more than a few times last season, and thus was familiar with his game. He was dominant at the college level. Take-the-game-by-the-scruff-of-the-neck type of a player. But he was on a whole different level tonight. At 6-3/210, he’s got good, imposing size, and he was always pretty fast, but he must’ve been retrofitted with warp drive tonight because ho-lee crap! At one point he collected the puck at his own blue line, turned, and blasted through the neutral zone at a speed not seen since Sonic the Hedgehog, ending up well ahead of all but one defender and prompting an impressed “Hoo!” from the crew in the broadcast booth. His goal may not have been pretty, but it did show that Stalberg isn’t afraid to go to the problem areas and score hard-nosed goals. Play like that the rest of the way and you start the year with the big club, Vik.
But the flip side of all that young talent and — shudder — truculence is that your team still isn’t very good. They gave up too many breaks due to rookie or simply bad mistakes, took too many penalties and couldn’t kill convincingly one to save their lives. Case in point: they gave up a power play goal to a unit featuring a trio of Shawn Thornton-Steve Begin-Jeff Lovecchio. They also gave up goals to Brad Marchand and, shockingly, former Leafs fan punching bag Andy Wozniewski, who netted the game-winner.
But that’s not to say they didn’t acquit themselves well in the areas that at least make a bad team a pain in the ass to line up against. Of the game’s four fights, Toronto went undefeated on the judge’s scorecards, and only punched to a draw once, but the A-No.1 Fight of the Night goes to Andrew Jay Rosehill pounding the everliving crap out of Byron Bitz’s head and reducing it to a fine paste in the first period.
It was ugly, but in a very entertaining way. I think I’ll watch more Leafs games this year.
(Patrice Bergeron, by the way, looked like he might just be back to being 2006 Patrice Bergeron. Two assists for the kid. And no concussions. So that’s good.)
