WordsOfWisdom

It always seems like Toronto has to overpay to get players here. Maybe they thought it was a crappy draft coming up? Maybe it's all or nothing right now for the Leafs? I don't know. Maybe Taylor Hall is so sh_t right now that Foligno was considered the more valuable commodity?

That probably speaks volumes about how worthless Taylor Hall has become. Foligno was the captain of the Blue Jackets, so probably more than just a pure numbers guy. My only gripe here is giving up a 1st round pick for a guy who is on an expiring contract. You want to at least get a few years out of someone like Foligno if you give up a 1st to get him. If he does nothing for the Leafs and is let go at the end of the season, then the Leafs will have lost an elite player in the draft for nothing.

I agree that with Buffalo's roster in YOUR division, they were never going to be in the playoffs this season. I think Sabres management probably thought they would be competitive for one of the final playoff spots. For them to be the worst team in the NHL was unexpected. I think if you look at the Flyers going into last season, nobody expected the Flyers to win a division title. They weren't even picked to make the playoffs if I recall correctly. It wasn't until that incredible winning streak that people really started to take notice of them. The Flyers play last season caught a lot of teams by surprise. So, that's why I think they were too high last season and now they're slightly too low this season (but that's because of the division). The truth of where the Flyers really are when life (hopefully) returns to normal is take last year's team stats + this year's team stats and divide by two.

Oh and for anyone who's curious, the 60-goal plateau for this season is at: ceiling(60/82x56) = 41 goals

Only one 50-goal season so far. (Last season he finished with 55.) We have to wait until he hits 35 goals this season for it to be back-to-back.

Sorry I couldn't hear you. My team's in first place. What were you saying?

One has to question whether there will be a next season or whether we'll be entering lockdown #4, 5, and 6. At this point there's no reason to think anything will be different, even with the vaccine going out to people. It's not making any difference to the number of new covid cases in Canada for example. I'm thinking the prospect of one more season without fans and the NHL will put a halt to its operations until further notice.

Hang on a minute. Your division has Buffalo, the worst team in the NHL. The Central division has Detroit. The Senators are bad, but they're not the worst team in the NHL. The North division is a division of mostly .500 teams. Playoff bubble teams who either just barely miss the playoffs or just barely get in. Ottawa is the only bad team in the division. If anything, you could say the North division is a division of 7's, 8's, 9's, and 10's, in terms of conference rankings under a normal NHL season. There's no overly powerful teams but there's also no real pushovers either. Looking at just last season's stats, the North division teams placed in their conference as follows: Toronto: 7th Montreal: 12th Ottawa: 15th Winnipeg: 6th Edmonton: 4th Calgary: 7th Vancouver: 8th So basically, 5 out of the 7 teams in the North division made the playoffs in a more normal NHL season with a somewhat normal NHL schedule.

You really are grumpy about these divisions aren't you? Now you know how it feels like to be Toronto and have Boston in your division. Too bad you couldn't have Tampa in there as well.

I don't how to answer that question in this context.

I mentioned Campbell in a previous thread a few months ago that he was going to be Toronto's #1 goalie shortly and here we are. Andersen played his way out of the starting job and Campbell has certainly made the most of his opportunity.

Usually it doesn't work out when a player becomes a GM. Yzerman is a rare breed indeed.

Buffalo is probably #1 most disappointing. I think the Flyers were a little too good last season for what they were. This season's drop off is more of a correction. Although under normal circumstances, I think you would be one of those bubble playoff teams fighting for the last spot. To me, that's where the Flyers are. A .500, middle of the pack team. Far from the bottom, but also far from the top.

I think it's safe to say that under normal circumstances, Toronto, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Montreal make the playoffs. They're all "bubble playoff teams". They've all been making the playoffs recently. (Montreal might be the only one out.) The only thing missing from the North is one of the elite teams. There's no Boston or Tampa for example. True, but it's also a fact that the Leafs have been running into the #1 team in the playoffs in the first round every year, and that's not what the first round of the playoffs is supposed to be about. If not for covid screwing up last season, the Leafs were on a collision course with Tampa in the first round, the eventual Cup champions! I mean you can't script that. The Leafs face Tampa, Boston, and Washington every time they hit the playoffs, all President's trophy level teams. This time the Leafs will actually face a team in the first round of the playoffs that isn't a Stanley Cup champion. They'll actually face a "first round level" team in the first round, and the playoffs will gradually increase in difficulty as they go on. Long story short, if the Leafs get past the first round, you could technically put an asterisk there, but I'd put an asterisk for all the seasons the Leafs ran into a Cup champion or Cup finalist in the first round... because running into the eventual Cup champion in round 1, pushing them to 7 games and being eliminated in round 1, is not indicative of how good your team is. lol You just watch. Every player will copy Matthews now and they'll all have one. I want to see him do it too.... but with the increasing craziness of our world today, the idea of playing 82 game uninterrupted seasons may be a thing of the past. This may be how things go from now on. From one lockout or pandemic directly into the next. I look at it like hockey from the era when teams only played 50 games or whatever. We need to rethink those milestones or we need to just start normalizing all the data so everyone is on a level playing field.

Matthews is closing in on that magical mark! To achieve the equivalent of a 50-goal season, Matthews needs to hit "ceiling(50/82x56)" = 35 goals. He now has 30. Five more!

I don't know how long that dust bowl took to form but 3/4 of the NHL has formed since Toronto's last Stanley Cup win. Surely that's close enough.

But the good news is that it got mentioned. I bet people living in Colorado said nothing about it at all. In other words, if it doesn't get reported on SportsNet or TSN, you can be sure that ESPN (or the Outdoor Life network or wherever the h_ll the NHL is broadcast in the US these days lol) certainly wouldn't mention it. The honest to goodness truth is that you could open up a newspaper in Colorado and read NOTHING about the Avalanche. You could open up the Toronto Star newspaper and find out every last detail about the Avalanche...... in a TORONTO newspaper. And it has always been that way. I think you take the good with the bad. Yes, many of these publications cover the Leafs heavily, but it's well deserved. Largest hockey market = largest audience = largest coverage. However, those same publications (most of which are based in Toronto) are the only ones shining a spotlight on many of these US teams in non-traditional hockey markets. So if we're not covering your team, chances are nobody else is either.

So if it's Colorado vs Toronto in the Final, you wouldn't root for Toronto to end their drought? Fixed it for ya lol. Interesting tidbit: This forum doesn't have any Leafs related feeds in its Twitter news feed. All the Leafs related news here comes from me. In other words, you're extremely sheltered from Leafs news in this forum, and I'd say every other story gets told here (if I'm being honest). The news feed covers the Coyotes as much as the Leafs. Plus, even if you're in Leaf-land like I am, our programs talk about all the teams. In fact, most of the NHL coverage of all 30+ teams comes from Toronto. So while we obviously talk about our own team as well (who wouldn't right?), if it weren't for networks like SportsNet and TSN, there would be no coverage at all of the players and transactions occurring in places like Vegas, Arizona, Anaheim, Carolina, etc. because those teams don't get any press in their local market. Vancouver isn't going anywhere this season. The Lightning and Wild are a different story however.

We'll take all the good karma we can get.

Sometimes a loss is so deflating that you can't recover from it. Leafs never got over the game 6 loss. Gretzky carried the Kings on his shoulders in game 7. It also seems to be an unwritten rule in hockey that to win a Stanley Cup you need to get past the game's greatest player at some point in your journey. You can never dodge the Wayne Gretzky's of the hockey world, which is why the first impediment to Toronto's Stanley Cup hopes this season is without a doubt Connor McDavid. The Leafs will have to get past him if they want to see another conference final. Yeah it's a team game, but McDavid is the modern day Gretzky, and he could potentially bury the Leafs by himself, just like Gretzky did in 93.

Interesting tidbit of knowledge: Rarely (if ever) did a medieval battle axe have an axe blade on both sides. Why? Well, it adds a lot of extra weight to the weapon, and you only need one side to strike with. Typically, the opposite side of a medieval axe had a spiked end designed to penetrate armor. Like this:

You get good mileage out of that emoji lol!

Not to make this all about Toronto again........ but if the Leafs can't have fans in the arena, and if we can't have a parade to celebrate winning the Cup after, then I hope this isn't the year the Leafs break the drought. It would feel like the cheapest, shi__est victory ever to win now given the current circumstances. I want the Leafs to win when everything is back to normal. Asses in seats, and crowds of people not wearing masks for the parade.

The NHL used to have a format similar to this in the early 1990's. Top 4 in each division made the playoffs and you had 1 vs 4, 2 vs 3. Round 1 was called the division semi-final. Round 2 was called the division final. Round 3 was the conference final. Round 4 was the Stanley Cup final. I agree. Seeing a Canadian team as one of the final four teams is definitely nice. Still only a 25% chance of winning the Cup, and we all know they're going to get smashed in the conference final to make a US vs US final, but at least it's two playoff rounds more than what the Canadian teams usually see so that's something.

Well admittedly, the Leafs would have made the Finals if Kerry Fraser hadn't blown the call on the high stick by Wayne Gretzky to Doug Gilmour in 1993. It should have been Leafs vs Habs that year for the Cup. Not saying Toronto would have won. (All evidence points to them being shut down by Roy just like the Kings were.) However, they should have been in the Final and would have been if not for that blown call.