The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

See, there are three kinds of Leafs fans right now and all of them are intolerable and stupid.

The first kind is the one that is ironically going, “LOL LET’S PLAN THE PARADE.”

These people are annoying because everyone on the planet knows the Maple Leafs are still going to finish with a lottery pick. How do they know that, those of you who have been furiously F5ing Lost fansites all week for the latest theory on the smoke monster (he’s a dinosaur made of smoke what’s not to get?) might be asking? Because their second-line center tonight was like John Mitchell or something stupid like that. Have you heard of John Mitchell? I have. He’s the crippled old dude from Lost that is the boss of The Island or something. I don’t know. I barely watch that show. Anywho, yes, the team is crap so you’re calling attention to how crap it is by acting like it’s not crap. We got it.

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The Lead

How you know Toronto had a bad night: they lost to Carolina 5-4 in a shootout. No, it’s true!

I’m not enough of a masochist to actually sit down and watch a game between the two worst teams in the NHL (and besides I was already planning on subjecting myself to the Blackhawks/Flames game that ended up being evocative of a scene involving a pinball machine in The Accused), but holy crap on a platter. It was like a regional sales convention of failure.

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The Lead

Lock up your daughters, National Hockey League, because the real Toronto Maple Leafs are finally here and ready to get them all pregnant.

The Leafs, losers of something like 1,782 in a row (only one went down as an overtime loss), skulked their way into the Honda Center to play the Ducks and everyone on the planet was all like, “Oh the Ducks, jeez, they made the playoffs last year and Ryan Getzlaf and Scott Niedermayer oh no poor Leafs.” Like Brian Burke’s was gonna listen to that garbage. Please.

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The Lead

So the Maple Leafs now have one point from six games. Leafs fans are understandably, err, miffed by this. But have heart, Torontonians, things could be a lot worse, if you really think about it.

So to help you through this time of trouble, I’ve composed a list of things that would make the Leafs’ current situation even worse:

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(Ed. note: Can you believe neither the AP nor Reuters had a picture of these three from tonight’s game?)

The Lead

It’s entirely likely that none of the three will be in the NHL by the time the puck drops on the real live NHL season. But over the last few days, Brian Burke has gotten a real good look at what could, within a year or two, develop into a very, very good scoring line and, unlike pretty much every line in the entire NHL, could be composed entirely of young players that went the college route.

The trio of Tyler Bozak, Christian Hanson and Viktor Stalberg, all of whom gave up some NCAA eligibility to join the Leafs, have been absolutely magic together, combining for four goals in the three games during which they’ve played as a line. Stalberg, a product of the University of Vermont, got the Leafs on the board tonight with assists from Bozak, who played two years at the University of Denver, and Hanson, who skipped his senior year at Notre Dame to go pro.

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(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.

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The Lead

Maybe Brian Burke was just what the Leafs needed.

I mean, obviously he’s not going to have to great an impact on the on-ice product and he just started Saturday, but it’s difficult to argue with results. Two days after beating up on the Flyers pretty bad, the Leafs went to California, possibly with an achin’ in their heart, and mounted an acceptably solid, hard-working comeback to win 3-1.

Obviously the Leafs have worked hard all year — they’ve been among the hardest workers I’ve seen so far this season — but they’ve had little to show for it, and, given the talent up and down that roster, they’ve probably gotten what they deserve from a personnel standpoint.

But it was interesting to me that during LeafsTV’s extensive interview with Brian Burke, he brought up an interesting concept while discussing his being in charge of Team USA’s 2010 Olympic roster. Herb Brooks, who of course was in charge of the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” team and all that, was a master motivator and got everything he could out of a group of college players. You know the story. But what Burke said was that Brooks didn’t have the best players. Far from it. But he had the best team, and Burke, by implication, seems committed to letting his current team take a whack at succeeding without any big player movements or shakeups. That’s certainly admirable.

But if Burke’s looking to fire up another miracle and somehow get this clattering hodgepodge of mediocre players anywhere near a playoff spot, his team is going to have to work just as hard as it did tonight to even have a chance. Maybe even harder.

Not giving up goals like the one Alex Frolov scored to open the scoring 57 seconds into the game is a good place to start. (Pro tip: You can’t let a guy like Frolov get behind your defense.) The Leafs are very lucky indeed that the Kings are still as young as they are and that Anze Kopitar hasn’t looked himself of late, because if you give up a goal that early to most NHL teams, especially those in the Western Conference, there’s a damn good chance that you never come back from it. The Leafs, to their credit, did immediately settle down and didn’t give up another goal for the rest of the night, though they did allow another couple breakaways that, had it not been for Vesa Toskala standing on his head, might’ve cost them.

On the other end, Jason LaBarbera, of all people, was also playing remarkably well. He stopped a couple Leafs rushes in the first period (one on Mikhail Grabovski and one on Matt Stajan and Nik Antropov) and kept the Kings up for two full periods, but the Leafs were working too hard and doing a surprising amount of little things right. Except, of course, for when Wayne Simmonds helped put both Tomas Kaberle and Pavel Kubina in the box at the same time for unsportsmanlike conduct (a penalty shared by Simmonds) and hooking, respectively. Ron Wilson had to have been a little perturbed that his top defensive pairing was sitting in the box because of something a fourth-line agitator did, especially when it results in a 4-on-3 power play for LA near the end of the second period. But the Leafs killed it, and used that to shift the momentum headed into the third.

It was Stajan that finally broke through the Los Angeles defense 10 seconds into a 5-on-3 that was the result of tripping calls to Sean O’Donnell and Dustin Brown. The goal came with three seconds remaining in O’Donnell’s infraction, and Brown could only watch from the box as Grabovski converted on the remainder of that power play. That was pretty much it. Jeff Finger, who had a shockingly great night, added an empty netter.

But this was the blue print for how the Leafs have to win hockey games, minus the whole giving-up-a-goal-less-than-a-minute-in thing. Work their asses off for 60 minutes and grind one out. Had this been an LA team that was playing a little better at the moment, or had Toskala not been outstanding in making 32 saves, it might’ve been a different result. But the Leafs, and Burke, have to be happy with four points from two games regardless of opponent or circumstance. Work hard and keep the game simple. Herbie would’ve liked that.

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In the first semi-major trade of the season that will actually have a significant impact on both teams, the Maple Leafs acquired the white-hot Lee Stempniak from the St. Louis Blues for Alex Steen and Carlo Colaiacovo.

As mentioned in this week’s WWL, Ron Wilson was disenchanted of Colaiacovo’s lack of fitness, and the Leafs in general had to be unhappy with Steen’s 2-2-4 line through 20 games. Steen’s never scored less than 15 goals in his career and right now he’s on pace for about eight. Colaiacovo has one point in 10 games and is currently injured. Both are signed for next year.

It was also a good move by Toronto to get Stempniak, who has 13 points in 14 games this year and 12 in his last seven, for almost nothing. St. Louis made the deal, I suspect, simply because it needed warm bodies to fill out the lineup every night. There’s no other reason to trade a player as good as Stempniak, who scored 27-25-52 two years ago and is playing at almost a point-a-game pace. The move also clears up about half a million in cap space for the Leafs.

Phenomenal move for Toronto on all fronts, and an understandable one for St. Louis.

So yesterday the Habs’ Tom Kostopoulos was given a three-game suspension after he demolished Mike Van Ryn from behind along the endboards, which was a perfectly reasonable suspension.

But how is there no action being taken against the Canadiens for the way they treated former teammate Mikhail Grabovski?

I hate to be the one that is constantly calling for this player or that player to be suspended or fined or whatever and I’m not doing so here, but it’s pretty clearly a team directive to punish Grabovski for the crap he pulled with Montreal last year. Not that he helped his own cause by taunting various Habs players over the course of the night, but again, this strikes me as something that came down from the top.

Watch that video around 1:10 into it. Right before Koivu gets in his face about something, he makes a point to not pull up short of Grabovski even though he is clearly prone on the ice after having been drilled just after the whistle on an offside call.

For those that don’t know the full story here, Grabovski spent much of the season as a healthy scratch and one day, before a road game in Phoenix for which he was once again going to be watching from the press box, he flew to Los Angeles instead to meet with his agent. Neither the Habs players nor front office types took too kindly to that and now that Grabovski has been traded to the Leafs, even his lifelong friends the Kostitsyn brothers are lining up against him.

According to La Presse (click for moon language.. translation from HFBoards):

“He is not my friend anymore,” said Kostitsyn on Monday. “I do not have respect for him. He’s not even a team player.”

…

”I have a good memory, we’ll see each other again,” when thinking about the next game between the two team on January 8th.

Other pertinent quotes followed.

Alex Kovalev: “No, don’t talk to me about him. He’s in Toronto and I am here. I’ve got nothing to say.”

Chris Higgins: “He’s not here anymore. I don’t care about him.”

Guy Carbonneau: “He’s playing a lot and he’s happy in Toronto. Good for him.”

Now I’m not saying Grabovski’s actions were justified because they weren’t, but they were taking run after run at him on Saturday with very little recourse from the Leafs and surprisingly no action from the league, especially in light of that second Kostitsyn quote. Even Grabovski seems to imply that he believes the orders came down from Carbonneau.

It will be interesting to see how everything shakes out on Jan. 8.

So Jason Blake is a healthy scratch for the Leafs’ game with the Bruins tonight.

In his place: Ryan Hollweg.

Hard to figure what Ron Wilson’s thinking here. He says Blake’s game lately has been flat, and that’s certainly true. But I don’t see how replacing him with Hollweg helps the fact that the Leafs can’t put the puck in the net.

“It’s a challenge for me,” he said. “I had a lot to think about [during the suspension]. I just have to be careful.”

Uh huh. You’ve had a lot of suspsensions to think about this though, so I don’t know that this talk of contrition exactly rings true. The good news is that, unlike the Blues (against whom Hollweg has gotten his last two suspensions), the Bruins have guys like Milan Lucic and Zdeno Chara who’ll actually, y’know, beat the piss out of Hollweg if he so much as looks at a star player the wrong way.

For the record, I have nine minutes of ice time before he really tries to run somebody.