Maple Leafs Always Good for a Few Laughs

Torontonians have been positively pumped up in regard to the Maple Leafs’ chances this upcoming NHL season. That is until Tuesday night when, following a 5-0 defeat against the Ottawa Senators, any hope they might have had got deflated like a bad balloon animal made vulnerable to the countless pins and needles on which Toronto’s roster is now certainly walking.

I’m reminded of that car gag that has one clown after another exiting an undersized vehicle. You think to yourself there can’t possibly be one more in there, and, then, lo and behold... Substitute clowns for mistakes made on the ice and you have the Leafs game in a nutshell.

Sure, this is the pre-season, but the Leafs iced nine NHL regulars on Tuesday... 10 if you count supposed superstar-in-the-making Nazem Kadri, who ended the game much like most of his teammates, in the red in the +/- column. The Senators in contrast played just eight major leaguers, and that’s being somewhat generous to Jesse “Don’t Play Me if You Want to Win” Winchester.

Now, the boxscore doesn’t always tell the whole story, but when a 27-year-old with just 31 career points scores the game-winning goal against your team, set up by Roman Wick and Ryan Keller (who???) no less, you’ve got big problems. Probably more of an indication of just how bad the Leafs were: they had six power plays in the second period alone (to the Senators’ none), including a couple two-man advantages, and still couldn’t score on rookie goalie Robin Lehner.

Broken down, what that means is that on Tuesday night the Leafs wouldn’t have been able to hit the broad side of a barn blocked by just three cows and one lowly, scared-out-of-his-mind, mask-wearing calf that had essentially been sent out to be slaughtered for his veal. In other words, they sucked.

If you believe the (Toronto media’s) hype, the Leafs, who finished 29^th in the league last season, are supposed to be this much-improved squad. According to those media types, they have more depth. Someone should tell Toronto that when you’re starting at close to zero on the depth scale, almost anything constitutes an improvement. I mean, if they signed one of those cows right now, management would at least be able to offer Santa Claus some milk with their cookies come Christmas, at which point a decent hockey team will be atop most everyone’s lists once again.

This isn’t meant to detract from general manager Brian Burke’s efforts thus far. I actually think the Kessel deal was a good one and he really has improved the team, but nowhere near as much needed to make it playoff-bound. Just look at their projected top six of Kessel, Nikolai Kulemin, Tyler Bozak, Kris Versteeg, Mikhail Grabovski, and Colby Armstrong.

Forget that Armstrong and Versteeg would be third-liners on a good team, or that Grabovski was so far down the Montreal Canadiens depth chart once upon a time that not only was Kyle Chipchura ahead of him at the center position, but he was eventually traded for a mere second-round pick (and a throw-in prospect). Instead, look to Burke’s own words in discussing Kulemin, when the two sides were negotiating a contract earlier this summer:

“When the team stinks, (players) get ice-time they don’t deserve,” he told the Toronto Sun, clearly in truer words never before spoken. “We’re not going to pay a player money for situational ice time he gets by default.”

Kulemin eventually got $2.35 million per year, which is still arguably top-six money. Kessel, though, still remains the team’s only legitimate offensive forward. Admittedly, he and Bozak showed a lot of chemistry last year, but Bozak’s decent rookie season was clearly the by-product of him playing with Kessel than anything else. Needless to say, there’s a reason the term is “top-six” forwards and not “top one”. If you have a “top one”, you’re looking at a “top spot” in the draft, something that has also been taken away from the Leafs as well, along with their long-since-dissipated dignity which began to slowly fade sometime, oh, I don’t know, after 1967.

"It's such a relief to finally be a big fish in a small pond... What's that? The only fish?"

Meanwhile, in goal, Burke was able to acquire the over-the-hill Jean-Sebastien Giguere last year to mentor the up-and-coming Jonas Gustavsson. However, recent reports have surfaced that Giguere will be the number-one goalie this year meaning one of two things: either the Leafs aren’t as optimistic about Gustavsson’s long-term potential as they once were (that they’ve resorted to going with whatever second-hand trash washed up out of the Anaheim Ducks’ pond) or they’re thinking Gustavsson’s telltale heart murmur poses a very real threat.

And, finally, in regard to the Leafs strongest point, their defense, yes they do have eight NHL-calibre defensemen raring to go, but, of those eight, two are Jeff Finger and Brett Lebda, who are barely top-six material, and two others are Luke Schenn and Carl Gunnarsson, whose development is being sacrificed as likely little more than a propagandistic ploy to give the team’s fans something to cheer about, because there’s little else.

Instead, team management would do better to ice a bunch of clowns, because at least it’s their job to make the people laugh. When the Leafs do, it’s just sad. So, while the Leafs will no doubt be better than they were last season, there’s little cause for celebration, unless the circus suddenly rolls into town to take fans’ minds off what is certain to be another non-playoff year.