WordsOfWisdom

A glimpse into what the Leafs might have enjoyed right now if they had exorcized their playoff demons:

Oh. My bad.

I don't think it's possible to sell high with Phil Kessel. He seems like a good guy at first, then things turn sour quickly. If your team is winning, he seems to be able to keep it together for a bit. If the team encounters any adversity, he's like the anchor that will drag your ship down.

Kessel seems to have a short shelf life wherever he goes. Boston couldn't stand him. Toronto couldn't stand him. Now Pittsburgh can't stand him. One word: TOXIC.

I finished 3rd.

How come I didn't get any points for St. Louis reaching the finals??? I had the correct team from the West and didn't earn any points in my bracket for it.

I looked at a list of the top 25 worst trades in Leafs history and I truly believe the Tuukka Rask trade has to be #1 because the list doesn't factor in how the traded player came back to harm the Leafs -- it only looks at their career performance in general. Rask has wiped out the Leafs THREE TIMES now in recent playoff memory. His performance has hurt the Leafs more than Scott Niedermayer, Lindros, or any other missed opportunity draft pick or traded star ever did to Toronto. It would be the equivalent of the Philadelphia Flyers trading draft pick Sidney Crosby to Pittsburgh and then being eliminated in the playoffs every year by the Penguins while Crosby scored hat tricks every game and won the Conn Smythe award.

The question is how. I don't see the Leafs adding anything to their roster this off-season. There's no cap room to add players. I only see deletions coming. I see key players leaving for bigger contracts elsewhere, and the holes being filled by prospects/draft picks. It's sort of like a "core reset" if you will. The Leafs tried to win with the core group that they have had for the past three years. It hasn't worked. That usually means the core gets changed in some dramatic way before the team is ready to try again (usually three years down the road). The Leafs are entering the "drop-off phase" of their rebuild. The early peak that didn't quite peak high enough followed by the "trough of tinkering" that teams like the Sharks and Blues have gone through in recent years to try and get the right mix of players.

Well, on one hand, the Leafs can say they pushed the (most likely) Stanley Cup champs to seven games before losing..... which would suggest that the Leafs were as close as you could get to winning a Cup (while still going out in the first round of course). On the other hand, the Leafs collapsed for the third time, losing a commanding 3-2 series lead before another game 7 meltdown (soft goal by Andersen and another brain fart by Gardiner being the difference in the deciding game). The problem the Leafs face is that this really was their year. This was the season they could have won it all (for real). This was their last best chance. It could have been them facing the winner of the Sharks/Blues series. It truly is a lost opportunity. Unfortunately, the price for failure now is quite possibly Marner, Gardiner, and Kapanen, with no replacements coming. A hard lesson to learn in a ruthless cap era. When you have all the pieces in place, you get ONE, maybe TWO chances, to get it right. After that, the core of your team is dismantled. The Leafs now face the familiar prospect of having too much money tied up in too few players -- players who can't possibly exceed expectations. You can't win that way. You need to have some "bargains" on your roster in a cap world. If everyone is getting paid what they're worth then you can't possibly have a Cup-calibre team that stays under the cap. The Leafs need to find and develop the next Marner, the next Gardiner, and the next Kapanen, and hopefully soon.

I always feel like I'm receiving an apology when I get a notification about this message thread.

You're the best! That confirms what I suspected! Here is a screen capture of the video (since YT videos have a way of disappearing):

No doubt lol.

I agree with you. It's insane. However, I'm more interested in THIS ONE PARTICULAR INCIDENT because it's my belief that it's a result of the NHL botching a rule change that came into effect in 2005-06 after the lockout. So because the NHL didn't think it through when they moved the blue lines, we now have offsides occurring during line changes with players who aren't involved in the play. It's a glitch in the game. A bug that needs fixing. My two cents (as usual).

I don't know if you were high, tired, completely disinterested, or all of the above when you wrote that lol.