The Two-Line Pass

I was working on a long, well thought-out, hilarious post on the NHL’s Board of Governors discussing the relocation of a current team to Toronto, to be the area’s backup Maple Leafs.

“Why shouldn’t we put another team in the best and biggest market in the world?” one of several NHL governors who spoke anonymously said of the Greater Toronto Area.

Makes sense to me. Hell, they sold out every seat in Hamilton and those guys didn’t even HAVE a team.

Ah the jokes I was making. “The CBC can finally live out its dream of an all-Toronto Hockey Night in Canada.” “I hope the new Toronto team wins a Cup the first year out of the box.” “For all those fans who think the Leafs are just too good.” You get the idea (and yes, I acknowledge that none of those could even begin to fit the average person’s definition of funny).

Well, turns out I had to delete the whole damn thing.

“The story is nonsense,” one highly placed NHL source told the Star. “Perhaps the musings of one team representative. Expansion to Toronto has never been discussed with the board, the executive committee or any other league committee.

“And its never been considered internally.”

So much for that. You’ll have to make TSN2 and Cliff Fletcher jokes for yourselves now.

So yesterday Ryan Hollweg was suspended another three games for boarding Alex Pietrangelo (this is in addition to the other games he was already suspsended for boarding someone else this year).

Thing is, Hollweg doesn’t feel like he’s in the wrong here. At all. Know whose fault it was? Pietrangelo, that’s who!

“I really don’t think the hit was worth a game misconduct to begin with, so for them to [add] any more games would have been a little bit over the line,” Hollweg said of his hit on Pietrangelo. “Now, they’re trying to make a point but like I said, the player was up on the power play the next shift. He wasn’t injured.

“It was a play where, if [Pietrangelo] continued to skate forward, it doesn’t even happen. So I think other players have to be accountable as well for putting themselves in vulnerable positions.”

That’s true, Ryan. If only Pietrangelo had been smart enough to not catch a stick in his back by a repeat offender and then be driven face-first into the glass. Pietrangelo’s only mistake was allowing himself to be on the ice while a TOTAL piece of garbage like Hollweg was also out there. If Hollweg had been, y’know, suspended for more than just the two games he had already faced, this never would’ve happened.

“With that kind of speed, with that momentum, it’s hard to change gears within a split second like that,” Hollweg said.

And that’s why Alex Pietrangelo had to have his head bounce off the glass like a ping pong ball. Makes total sense.

Earlier this morning I read an article about how Ryan Hollweg wanted to get back to his physical game in the Leafs’ Thanksgiving afternoon game with the Blues.

So I’m watching the Leafs/Blues game just now, and exactly four minutes of ice time after he returned from a two-game suspension for picking up three game misconduct penalties for boarding in his last 41 games, Hollweg got a five-minute major and a game misconduct for boarding.

He PASTED Alex Pietrangelo, St. Louis’ first-round pick in this past draft, well after the play. It was a revolting play from a revolting player. Incidentally, the boarding call that got him suspended last time also came against the Blues in an Oct. 1 exhibition game.

This will result in his third suspension since March 26 of last season, when he got three games for (you guessed it) boarding!

A couple things occur to me here.

1) Tom Renney is a saint for keeping this guy under control as long as he did. There is clearly something wrong with Ryan Hollweg if he’s offending this much. Like “Chris Simon” wrong. He has almost no control over his aggression, and he’s going to seriously hurt somebody one of these days.

2) The League has to do something more than a two- or three-game suspension here. Giving up two games and $5,000 in fines clearly means nothing to him, and the NHL has to take a much harder tack to send the message that this type of play is COMPLETELY unacceptable. Both of the first two suspensions of the NHL season will have been dealt to Hollweg, and both for the same offense. It’s ridiculous.

3) I retroactively support Chris Simon.

We’re now something like 29 days out from the start of the NHL season so I figure this is as good a time as any to start doing the season previews. This is mainly for two reasons: 1) I am lazy and there’s no way I’ll do one of these every day, and 2) This is early enough that if I just stop doing them entirely you’ll have forgotten by October anyway. Oh and I guess also to show off my near-infinite knowledge of the National Hockey League. I’ll be previewing the teams in reverse order of finish in the 2007-08 season. Please note, though, that this is the opinion of one man, however smart and handsome he may be.

Toronto Maple Leafs, you’re on the clock.

For the record, I’m still laughing about that Jeff Finger contract.

Jeff Finger. For $3.5 million dollars. Holy hell.

And the best part, it might not even be the worst contract on the team. Jason Blake at $4 million’s right up there. And yeah, the Leafs fans out there are going to argue that he had 52 points last year and that’s no so terrible, which is true enough. But here’s the problem, and it points to a problem we’ve seen with a lot of these bottom-of-the-barrel teams I’ve previewed so far: no offense at all.

Last year, the Maple Leafs were paced by a 78-point season from Mats Sundin. Pretty solid. After that, the next closest guys are Nik Antropov, Tomas Kaberle and the aforementioned Mr. Blake. Point totals for those three: 56, 53, 52. What do they all have in common? Sundin was the player with whom they combined to score the most points. He and Antropov combined on 25 goals (45 percent of Antropov’s scoring), 22 for Kaberle (42 percent) and 16 with Blake (31 percent).

Now the Leafs might have to live with the idea of not having Sundin around any more. That’s a scary thought.

More after the jump.

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Shed not a tear, Bryan. Where you're going, no one will care how many goals you get torched for.

Bryan McCabe is finally done with the Maple Leafs, and it looks like he’s going to be traded to the Florida Panthers.

Reports started to trickle out last night that he would be traded to Florida within a few weeks. They’re just waiting for some $2 million bonus from the Leafs to clear.

A delay in the announcement is linked to the Leafs willingness to pick up a $2 million bonus McCabe is due on September 1st. After the payment is made only then will the transaction be accepted by the NHL.

Now this trade prompted a lot of speculation from the Toronto-based national media that still has obsession with the Leafs despite their, um, awfulness (witness 23 of next year’s 37 Hockey Night in Canada 7 p.m. games being Toronto-centric).

Who would the Leafs get in return? Promising young centerman Stephen Weiss? Outstanding winger Nate Horton? Embittered defensive standout Jay Bouwmeester? Toronto’s air pollution problem? A bag of Tim Horton’s coffee beans?

Well, because the aforementioned players are all young and all very good, the Leafs won’t even get autographed hockey cards of them. Not for McCabe, who is not young and not very good AND has a monster contract.

Instead, the scuttlebutt is that the Panthers, possibly the only organization in the NHL more inept than the Leafs, will for once do the right(ish) thing and send over oft-injured defenseman Mike Van Ryn. What they should send is a 137th round pick and possibly a Miami Dolphins bumper sticker, but at least the Panthers are unloading Van Ryn’s contract, which has two years remaining on it at $2.9 million per.

By the way, click on the above link to the Sportsnet story and look at the picture of McCabe they use. Just outstanding.

Wait what?

Nice of Bryan McCabe to finally accept that playing in Toronto isn’t going to work out.

After seeing just how badly the team is going to do this year, he has at long last finally agreed to waive his no-trade clause. Maybe.

“Bryan is starting to think about possibly getting his career started somewhere else,” said Fletcher. “We’ll leave him alone. He’s going to get back to us in a couple of weeks. There’s not going to be any issues. I’m really confidant it’s going to be resolved amicably before training camp.”

Put it this way, someone has to pay him the $5.75 million cap hit he’s owed per season for the next three seasons, or he’ll get bought out. Depending on what the Leafs get back in trade, they’d be nearing the cap floor of $40.3 million and would certainly be in the bottom half of the league’s payrolls.

This is simple economics. Even with a buyout, McCabe would be unlikely to get anywhere near the kind of shortsighted money he signed for in Toronto and accepting a trade, anywhere, would make sure he keeps pulling down that type of cash. A few teams could use a big contract like his to get up above the cap floor.

No word on whether or not the Leafs will simply ask McCabe to stay home when training camp opens.

“We will certainly not sit idly by if the Maple Leafs take a position which is unreasonable and unfair to Bryan McCabe,” said Kelly. “In our view, telling him not to show up and to stay home, we would view that as utterly unreasonable … we would undoubtedly file a grievance and pursue that aggressively for Bryan.”

Fletcher insisted it wouldn’t come to that. “It won’t get resolved until early September, but it will get resolved,” said Fletcher.

The article also notes that McCabe’s wife is from New York, so a trade to the Rangers or Islanders could be in the offing, as if McCabe’s what either team needs.

The Cold Miser strikes again.

Someone over at HFBoards, your one-stop shop for insane trade ideas and stupid hockey opinions, posted a probable Maple Leafs lineup for opening day.

According to Toronto GM Cliff Fletcher, everything is going according to plan. If his plan is to build the worst offense in the history of hockey, he’s right on.

Ponikarovsky - Antropov - Kulemin
Steen - Stajan - Blake
Hagman - Mayers - Bell
Devereaux - Moore - Hollweg
(Tlusty - Grabovski)

This might be the worst top-12 I’ve ever seen in the National Hockey League. The No. 1 center has a career high of 26 goals and 30 assists, and that was playing alongside Mats Sundin. Put it this way, those 12 players combined scored 160 goals last year.

That’s 29 less than the New York Islanders scored last season, and they were the worst offensive team in the league. Add in the fact that the Leafs’ D corps is composed of the defensively irresponsible hodgepodge of Bryan McCabe (5 goals), Tomas Kaberle (8), Pavel Kubina (11), Jeff Finger (8), Carlo Colaiacovo (2), Ian White (5), Anton Stralman (3), Staffan Kronwall (0) and Jonas Frogren (rookie), they’re in unbelievable shape.

Also, the goaltending tandem of Vesa Toskala and Curtis Joseph is going to get them nowhere.

In the wake of the Jeff Finger signing, someone had to step in and say enough was enough.

That’s why the NHL rejected the Maple Leafs’ signing of 28-year-old Swedish defenseman Jonas Frogren yesterday.

The problem, not surprisingly, is that they wanted to give him too much money.

The league determined Frogren, 28, must be signed to an entry-level contract as a first-year NHL player despite his pro experience in Europe. The Leafs had signed Frogren to a standard contract.

It’s not hard to understand why teams feel like they need to spend lots of money to compete with the 2008-09 Stanley Cup champion Detroit Red Wings, but this is a pushing-30 defenseman who has never seen ice time in North America. That explains why Fletcher wants him in Toronto’s top six next year.

Sucks for Anton Stralman.

The Frogren contains MLSE. That's bad.