WordsOfWisdom

Flyers are going to face a well rested Leafs team that is desperate for a win.

It's official: gold, silver, and grey are the "IN" colors in the NHL right now. Expect every team to copy this until the trend gets run into the ground.

Normally, 46 goals-for is a number that any team in the NHL would be happy with, but sadly, the Leafs have allowed 45 goals -- the most in the NHL. Although the Leafs currently sit 3rd in the division, it's a mirage based on games played. The Lightning and Panthers are ahead of the Leafs and the Canadiens are essentially tied with Toronto. Last season the Leafs enjoyed a great start, and they needed it to secure a playoff spot due to a lackluster finish. This season, the Leafs have started slow and left themselves a hole to dig out of and no margin for error. The Leafs are playing at a point-a-game pace in a league where you need ~95 points to secure a playoff spot. Will there be changes coming?

Last time I checked, the Leafs were 1st in goals-for and 31st in goals-allowed. They currently sit fourth in the Atlantic division and are on pace for 89 points. I think it's pretty clear that Boston, Buffalo, and Tampa are the class of the division this year. The Leafs are destined to be the odd team out, and it's going to be almost impossible to plug the holes in this roster given how top heavy the Leafs are contract wise. I think this coming off-season Toronto will say goodbye to one of Tavares, Matthews, or Marner, in an effort to acquire an elite defenceman to complement Rielly and become a more complete team.

Exactly. lol From what I see, that tends to be what happens. There's more "room" on the ice, but it's room on the "outskirts" so to speak. You're basically skating around where the spectators are normally sitting, so it puts you farther and farther away from the net. While you could blow past a defender on the outside, you have a long way to cut inside to get to the net, and the defenders are just going to choke off access to the front of the net and ignore the area along the side boards.

Until 2020-21.....

I think the game could use a larger ice surface with the speeds the players are moving at now..... however, there's a danger that making the rink larger could further escalate player speeds and ultimately lead to fatal collisions between players. Having a smaller rink sort of "negates" the need for speed, because there isn't as much ground to cover. Don't forget Hello Kitty! lol. Although ironically, scoring diminishes with the Olympic sized ice surface because players are really just farther and farther away from the viable scoring areas. Defenders still occupy the same area on the ice in front of the net that they always do, and while the smaller players buzz around the periphery like hornets, they're never in a position to take a dangerous shot on goal because they're too far out and have no angle.

Not to worry. It's a long season. :) Leafs bounced back nicely against Detroit last night for the win. There's a good chance they don't make the playoffs this year though. I'm not convinced the team is stronger this season than it was last season. The moves made during the off season were either sideways moves or even backwards moves. I don't see any improvement defensively as of yet (beyond what they were last season), and until something changes there, this team will live or die by it's scoring.

I can't believe they lost this one. (Puts on tinfoil hat lol.) Is there collusion going on between the Leafs, Habs, and advertisers to deliberately extend these games? It seems that every TOR/MTL game seems to go to overtime, and usually to a shoot out. I thought the penalty call in the 3rd period against Toronto was weak. Could have been a dive. Then we have a penalty shot for throwing a broken stick while killing a penalty? GTFO. The jury is still out on whether or not this team can clamp down defensively. This was a 4-1 game and Toronto lost it.

I think women need their own Hall of Fame. It makes no sense to be placing women in the same HOF as NHL players because they are not playing the same game nor are they playing it at the same level. So no offence to Wickenheiser, but no. Putting female hockey players into what (for all intents and purposes) is the NHL HOF just reeks of appeasement. They might call it the HHOF, but it's the NHL that populates it. Sergei Zubov gets the nod I think because he was the best offensive defenceman in the game for the better part of a decade. As for the rest? No thanks. If it were up to me, I think Roenick is in. Mogilny is in. Alfredsson is in. LeCavalier, I'd have to think about it and look at his stats again. Mogilny gets in for being the first Russian defector into the NHL. He changed the game forever... not to mention his stats were mind boggling in his earlier years. Roenick has to be one of the highest scoring American players ever. How is Modano in and not Roenick?

@Kordic27 Again, this is old news. It's like you're spamming the forum with old videos. Please keep things to current events/topics.

@Kordic27Holy smokes. Can you please upload these videos when they first happen? You're uploading videos of events that have long since passed.

Well I think the outcome here is predictable. The Leafs are going to lose a substantial amount of depth by trying to keep their top forward group together, and unless they "Pittsburgh Penguin's" this thing, I don't see it working. Matthews and Marner have to be like Crosby and Malkin for the Leafs to win this way, otherwise they've dumped too much money into these guys. Part of me was sort of expecting Marner to go elsewhere this off-season. I never thought they had a chance of re-signing him. This is the downside to a cap system. The Leafs had to win the Stanley Cup last season. That was their "window". This is like the first season AFTER the Cup win, where the team begins to get dissected.

It means nothing in the grand scheme of things. It's just a ceremonial title. I'd be fine with Tavares as captain because he's the veteran leader of this group. Matthews and Marner still have some growing up to do.

Is this just a case of the Leafs wasting money on off-ice staff because the cap prohibits them from spending money where it counts the most? :) To me, the value of an assistant coach in the NHL is: (lifts leg and makes a farting noise).

No doubt about it. I just want to see more goals coming from plays where a forward defeats that defence, finds an opening, and scores (because the average forward today is better too), and not from plays where a player simply directs a puck into a crowd of players from the side boards or blue line and the puck caroms off a skate and goes in.

This is a tricky one to explain. I know what you're saying and I agree that (overall) players are better and more highly skilled today. That wasn't my point though. My point is that skill isn't leading to goals as often as luck leads to goals in the NHL today. We are seeing a lot of pucks going in from accidental deflections and screened shots rather than goals where one player simply "out-skills" another and scores. Once upon a time, if you got the puck, you skated into the opposition zone at high speed and blasted a shot past the goalie to score. That's all skill. Today, a player will enter the zone with speed, slam the brakes on, circle back to the blue line, wait for a crowd to form in front of the net, and then flick the puck into the mosh pit of players standing in front of the goalie and hope for the best. That's not skill. That's no different than rolling the dice in a casino game. The difference between winner and loser is often just the team who got the bounces that night. If both teams play exactly the same way (which they pretty much do), someone is going to get those oddball deflections to go in and the other team isn't. So if one team flicks the puck into the crowd and gets 2 goals out of it and the other team does the exact same thing and the deflection hits a post or misses the net, they get 0 goals and lose. I'm not even talking about intentional deflections either. I'm talking about the unintended consequences of throwing the puck into a group of players and the puck bouncing off SKATES, LEGS, or other body parts and going into the net.

I'm actually in a good mood right now too. Summer is going nicely and I'm feeling refreshed. No NHL burnout whatsoever.

LOLOLOLOL!!!! I did that with my living room. (I needed a big room to practice in. Has mirrors and everything!) I do have a home office with a whiteboard lol!

What I find hard to watch is that the talent is spread so thin across all 31/32/etc..... teams that every team is the same. Every team has one good line and then a bunch of non-descript equally talented filler players that nobody remembers. If I was releasing a collection of hockey cards today, I would deliberately cap the number of cards in the set at 100. I'd pick the 3-4 most notable players per team and then nobody else would get a hockey card. Sorry, trying to keep things positive.

Interesting, because the season is usually set by the end of December. Whatever the standings are by January 1, those are your playoff teams more often than not. If 50% of the teams make the playoffs, how could the regular season not be cheapened right? A great comparable I like to make is with MLB. Back when MLB only let 4 teams into the playoffs, late season games were treated like playoff games. They had the same feel, and this was a league with 26 teams at the time (I believe). A late season series against a division rival could determine your playoff chances over one weekend. It was like playoff baseball but wasn't called playoff baseball. Whenever the league tries to "manufacture meaning" into the games it's usually because the games have none. The 3-point games were designed to keep the teams in the standings together, and as a result, they further remove meaning from the individual regular season games because now teams are playing for a 1-point separation on most nights instead of 2. You can go on a 10-game win streak and find that you're not putting any distance between your team and the team behind you. So it's manufactured parity. The NHL has reduced its regular season to a coin toss, and the playoffs are essentially four more coin tosses between equally skilled teams to determine a winner. When you look at the Stanley Cup winner (Blues most recently), I don't see a great hockey team. I see a team that is no better than anyone else that made the playoffs. Toronto could have easily beaten that team, yet Toronto was out in round one. The bounces just happened to go the Blues way, or they would have been gone long ago. They lucked their way to victory and they won't do it again next season because odds are the bounces won't go their way twice. That's just what the NHL is today. It's luck over skill now. It's not like it was 20-30 years ago when you had teams that were genuine powerhouse teams. Today's Stanley Cup champions don't strike fear in anyone, not even the teams that missed the playoffs, because they're usually only ONE player better than the non-playoff teams. (My two cents.)

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.