Leafs Record on Saturday...

[WordsOfWisdom]

I flipped tonight's game off when it was 2-0 Jets with 13 minutes to go in the 3rd period.  Naturally, the Leafs came back and won this one.

 

Had they not, they would have had a record of 1-3 on Saturday nights. So it's 2-2 instead with a lucky late game comeback but otherwise holy smokes don't watch the Leafs on HNIC unless you want to fall asleep on your couch.  I don't know what it is but this team plays terrible on Saturdays more often than not and I'm going to be tracking it this season. 

 

LEAFS RECORD ON SATURDAY - UPDATED:

 

1. Oct. 6 vs Senators: 5-3 loss
2. Oct. 13 vs Capitals: 4-2 win
3. Oct. 20 vs Blues: 4-1 loss
4. Oct. 27 vs Jets: 3-2 win
5. Nov. 3 vs Pittsburgh: 5-0 win
6. Nov. 10 vs Boston: 5-1 loss
7. Nov. 24 vs Philadelphia: 6-0 win
8. Dec. 1 vs Minnesota: 5-3 win
9. Dec. 8 vs Boston: 6-3 loss
10. Dec. 15 vs Florida: 4-3 loss (OT)
11. Dec. 22 vs New York Rangers: 5-3 win
12. Dec. 29 vs New York Islanders: 4-0 loss
13. Jan.05 vs Canucks: 5-0 win
14. Jan.12 vs Bruins: 3-2 loss
15. Feb.02 vs Penguins: 3-2 win
16. Feb.09 vs Canadiens: 4-3 win (OT)
17. Feb.16 vs Coyotes: 2-0 loss
18. Feb.23 vs Canadiens: 6-3 win
19. Mar. 2 vs Sabres: 5-2 win
20. Mar. 9 vs Oilers: 3-2 win
21. Mar. 16 vs Senators: 6-2 loss
22. Mar. 23 vs Rangers: 2-1(OT) loss
23. Mar. 30 vs Senators: 4-2 loss
24. Apr. 6 vs Canadiens: 6-5(SO) loss

 

 

Record: 12-12

 

 

 

[hobie]

Lucky? Unexpected, yes.

 

TO played a very good game against a top quality team and deserved the victory. 

 

It was a boring game and with TO's diminishing depth that will be the type of hockey that will win games.

 

It was a forward's mistake that resulted in Winny's 2nd goal otherwise it was a seriously good defensive effort by the whole team and that's how a team becomes good defensively. Expecting the d to take full responsibility for TO's spotty defensive record for years was/is wrong, it's a team game and TO played as a team last night. 

 

I prefer TO outscore the opposition not out defend them. 

[WordsOfWisdom]

On 10/28/2018 at 11:59 AM, hobie said:

It was a boring game and with TO's diminishing depth that will be the type of hockey that will win games.

 

(Silently grinds teeth and tries hard not to mention the salary cap for fear of driving people crazy.) 

 

I've been watching hockey since the early 1990's and I remember a time when teams had three lines that could score. If you took any team from today's NHL and put them up against a team from the early 90's, today's team would get destroyed. Every team is spread too thin. Modern NHL teams have about 1.5 lines worth of quality players and the rest are mostly just filler guys. Once upon a time you could ice two lines like Toronto's current top line and a 3rd line as good as Toronto's current 2nd line. 

 

The amount of expansion in the past two decades and the limits of the cap are extremely frustrating sometimes. I'm not convinced that the league is adding more NHL calibre players when it keeps adding teams. Ultimately they're just going to put the AHL out of business by stealing all of their players lol.    Maybe that's the idea. Maybe the NHL will just absorb all of the AHL teams into the league and we won't have a minor league in hockey any more. Everyone can just play in the NHL with a salary cap and one star player per team with fans paying NHL prices to watch AHL talent.  It'll be perfect.

 

(Sorry, I'll stop ranting. It's out of my system now I swear!) 

 

 

[WordsOfWisdom]

A satisfying 5-0 victory tonight, and long overdue for a Saturday game. The late short-handed goal was the icing on the cake. Gave me a good chuckle. Happy to see Full Kessel sulking on the bench again. Brought back memories... 

 

[BluPuk]

Yah, it can be kind of odd watching NHL hockey these days. Periods of tight checking, systemised defence, mechanical power plays, all wrapped up by amateur refereeing and unnecessary fighting. Players elbowing star players in the head as they speed by, because they have zero chance of ever catching the guy because those two players do not belong on the same ice. 

Followed by what I can only describe as "keystone cops" (google it) hockey, where both teams have their 4th line out and are so bad it is actually laughable. In all honesty, I had never laughed out loud due to lack of skill at an NHL game until this year. The last bloody thing the NHL needs is another team. They need to drop the weak franchises until they get to either 12 or 16 teams.

 

Rant over.

[WordsOfWisdom]

On 11/5/2018 at 7:06 AM, BluPuk said:

Yah, it can be kind of odd watching NHL hockey these days. Periods of tight checking, systemised defence, mechanical power plays, all wrapped up by amateur refereeing and unnecessary fighting. Players elbowing star players in the head as they speed by, because they have zero chance of ever catching the guy because those two players do not belong on the same ice. 

Followed by what I can only describe as "keystone cops" (google it) hockey, where both teams have their 4th line out and are so bad it is actually laughable. In all honesty, I had never laughed out loud due to lack of skill at an NHL game until this year. The last bloody thing the NHL needs is another team. They need to drop the weak franchises until they get to either 12 or 16 teams.

 

Rant over.

 

Out of all the major pro sports in North America, the NHL is drawing from the smallest pool of available talent... and yet the NHL has 31 teams (soon to be 32). If you consider how many more people play football, baseball, or soccer, there's no way the NHL should have that many teams. It's a mirage. They're draining the minor leagues to fill NHL rosters.  The NHL makes sense with about 20 teams in it. 

 

[WordsOfWisdom]

Another Saturday and another ugly loss for the Leafs. 

[BluPuk]

It's those damned Broons!! We can't beat them with a stick (neither a regular stick nor a hockey stick !) They are in our head(s)!

 

Almost makes me want to call for a pox on their house!

 

Nevermind, I'm alright now.......   

[WordsOfWisdom]

On 11/16/2018 at 6:44 AM, BluPuk said:

It's those damned Broons!! We can't beat them with a stick (neither a regular stick nor a hockey stick !) They are in our head(s)!

 

Almost makes me want to call for a pox on their house!

 

Nevermind, I'm alright now.......   

 

lol. 

 

Currently, the record doesn't bad. It's a .500 record on Saturdays, but given where the team is in the standings, you wouldn't know they were at the top of the conference by playing win one lose one hockey.  

 

Plus, at the time I wrote the thread they were on their way to a loss against Winnipeg. So it was going to be:

 

LOSS

WIN

LOSS

LOSS

 

In any event, this is a bit of a dull weekend.  

[BluPuk]

Yah, I don't get the schedule-makers. Knowing how the NHL likes to micromanage everything, I can't help but believe that they are involved. They want the big-market U.S. teams to have the stage all to themselves on the weekend maybe?

[WordsOfWisdom]

On 11/19/2018 at 8:12 AM, BluPuk said:

Yah, I don't get the schedule-makers. Knowing how the NHL likes to micromanage everything, I can't help but believe that they are involved. They want the big-market U.S. teams to have the stage all to themselves on the weekend maybe?

 

Probably because the later start to the games out west would mean pre-empting Vancouver, Calgary, or Edmonton on the second game of HNIC... which wouldn't be a bad idea ratings wise. 

  

[WordsOfWisdom]

Huge win against Philly last night! 

 

The team must be saying "Nylander who?" at this point. 

[BluPuk]

Yah, I've been saying that since he was drafted. I'm not a fan of that guy. I hope he misses this season and we can get a trade done next season.

[WordsOfWisdom]

On 11/25/2018 at 12:59 PM, BluPuk said:

Yah, I've been saying that since he was drafted. I'm not a fan of that guy. I hope he misses this season and we can get a trade done next season.

 

I hope we can get something for him THIS season!!! 

 

[WordsOfWisdom]

Leafs keep banking points in the standings and it's so refreshing to see. 

 

 

[hobie]

It was an ugly win against Minny.

[WordsOfWisdom]

On 12/2/2018 at 6:06 PM, hobie said:

It was an ugly win against Minny.

 

Was that the game the Leafs were out-shot by a 2:1 margin?

 

They're scoring goals and winning games, so nobody besides me is really complaining, but they're going to run into a team that plays a strong defensive game in the playoffs (like the Bruins historically do) and they'll be toast ..... unless they can clamp down and limit the chances they're giving up.

 

Of the last four teams that the Leafs have had which made the final four (conference finals), only the 1992-93 team and maybe the 1993-94 team was a strong defensive team. The teams that went out against Buffalo and Carolina were built EXACTLY like the Leafs are today. Loaded up front, great goalie, but soft defensively. 

 

 

[hobie]

When TO was crappy, it could take many shots from anywhere to give the facade of a team being competitive. Those Leaf teams weren't competitive, this team is. Shots, Corsi, Fenwick are simply stats, outscoring the opposition is the only barometer that matters.

 

I don't think TO is soft defensively and that's part of the reason TO can and does win. Other teams are better defensively but rarely will that better defensive team be able to score like TO will. We saw a suspect defensive Pitt. team win the Cup, Hainsey was a part of their top d pairing, so being stellar defensively isn't the only route to success.   

[WordsOfWisdom]

14 hours ago, hobie said:

When TO was crappy, it could take many shots from anywhere to give the facade of a team being competitive. Those Leaf teams weren't competitive, this team is. Shots, Corsi, Fenwick are simply stats, outscoring the opposition is the only barometer that matters.

 

I don't think TO is soft defensively and that's part of the reason TO can and does win. Other teams are better defensively but rarely will that better defensive team be able to score like TO will. We saw a suspect defensive Pitt. team win the Cup, Hainsey was a part of their top d pairing, so being stellar defensively isn't the only route to success.   

 

True, but given their history, why chance it?  Teams that are frequently out-shot don't keep winning hockey games for very long. 

 

I'd be happy if they could add one more piece to the blue-line and perhaps a Selke type forward who can play a strong defensive game.  A couple moves like that and the Leafs will be #1. 

 

[hobie]

Some of the worst d teams, from the past, have won the Cup, Edmonton in the '80s, Boston in the '70s, relying on d is always a possible route to ultimate success but so too is simply outscoring the opposition. Marner had 1 shot on goal against Carolina and this was after having taken only 3 shots in the prior 8 games, that's the type of player Marner is and the type of team TO is. TO wins because of quality of players and quality of shots, Carolina will continue to outshot their opposition but probably won't make the playoffs.

 

Should TO try to upgrade the d, sure, but only if they can find a truly dum team to trade with. TO is currently the 6th best d record in the NHL, the 2nd best record in the NHL and the 3rd best GF record in the NHL which all signify TO is a serious Cup contender.

 

Trade deadline acquisitions have led to Chicago's and LA's deplorable teams now, they felt they had to be better both on the ice and for depth purposes so they traded away the future for their Cups. There's no way of telling if their sacrificing the future had a significant affect on their winning the Cup. We have seen a Wash. be the best team in hockey for years and trade away the future to top their team up, last year they entered the playoffs with the team that got them there and won.

 

A 3, 5, 10 year rebuilding program isn't pleasant and if LL was still TO's GM that's what Leaf fans should expect, we saw LL trade away 2 2nd rounders to fill the 4th line center needs over 2 years.

 

I'm a Leaf lifer and I'd prefer to see TO shine for the next 20 years, a 20 year window of opportunity to win Cups rather than all inning now knowing the future will need to pay. I'd prefer TO win Cups but I also want a winner for as long as possible.

[WordsOfWisdom]

On 12/14/2018 at 12:05 AM, hobie said:

I'm a Leaf lifer and I'd prefer to see TO shine for the next 20 years, a 20 year window of opportunity to win Cups rather than all inning now knowing the future will need to pay. I'd prefer TO win Cups but I also want a winner for as long as possible.

 

I agree. I just wonder if the Leafs are stuck already given their cap situation and the contracts coming due. 

 

Will they be a stronger team next season or will they have to start shedding players due to cap issues and then ice an inferior team in 2019-20?

 

There are basically two schools of thought:

1. The "Go-for-it" / "all-in" approach  
2. The "in the mix" approach

Option 1 is where you trade futures and ignore cap issues in order to ice the best team you possibly can to win right now. This option places a team as the favourite to win. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but the price is that the team is torn apart when the season ends.

 

Option 2 is where you do just enough to stay afloat. You keep yourself in the top 8 within your conference and enter the playoffs as an underdog every season. If everything breaks just right, maybe you win the whole thing, and can keep the team together for next season. Odds are against this outcome however, so you give yourself multiple chances at it albeit with a low probability of winning each season.

 

 

[hobie]

On 11/3/2018 at 2:20 PM, WordsOfWisdom said:

 

(Silently grinds teeth and tries hard not to mention the salary cap for fear of driving people crazy.) 

 

I've been watching hockey since the early 1990's and I remember a time when teams had three lines that could score. If you took any team from today's NHL and put them up against a team from the early 90's, today's team would get destroyed. Every team is spread too thin. Modern NHL teams have about 1.5 lines worth of quality players and the rest are mostly just filler guys. Once upon a time you could ice two lines like Toronto's current top line and a 3rd line as good as Toronto's current 2nd line. 

 

The amount of expansion in the past two decades and the limits of the cap are extremely frustrating sometimes. I'm not convinced that the league is adding more NHL calibre players when it keeps adding teams. Ultimately they're just going to put the AHL out of business by stealing all of their players lol.    Maybe that's the idea. Maybe the NHL will just absorb all of the AHL teams into the league and we won't have a minor league in hockey any more. Everyone can just play in the NHL with a salary cap and one star player per team with fans paying NHL prices to watch AHL talent.  It'll be perfect.

 

(Sorry, I'll stop ranting. It's out of my system now I swear!) 

 

 

 

For years TO either bought, or tried to, the best UFAs available so TO was always quasi competitive without actually building a team. The last team TO had built was the Sittler team, it was actually built thru the draft and if not for such a nut case owner TO might have had better results.

 

Building teams has mostly been a foreign concept for TO and hiring BB with the promise of being competitive in 5 years again shows that the owners, again, weren't patient enough to allow some pain for possible gain.

 

In the old NHL, 6 teams, the NHL was basically comprised of Canadians, Canada's population was 20 mil. and tho Canada is highly represented still, the NHL has players from the USA and Europe in ever increasing numbers. The pool from which players are coming to the NHL is more like 800 mil. now. Since the pool from which NHL players are coming from is so much bigger now it's very possible that the hockey we see now has more good players than ever before and the game we are seeing is actually superior.

 

Sometimes the NHL network airs games from the 60s, they're slow and boring with all the non hockey activity going on.

 

In ancient times teams rewarded players that would bear hug, fight, trip, spear, etc. probably because there wasn't a big enough pool to generate enough quality players to fill the NHL so these actual nonNHL quality players were tolerated/rewarded. Bear hugging, fighting, etc. wasn't hockey. Philly built teams based on scaring the sh__ out of the opponent or more precisely scaring the hockey out of their opponents, now actual hockey teams are being constructed based on skill, speed, brains instead of size or disregard for human values.

 

Actual hockey players playing actual hockey will probably result in the size of the pool of potential players increasing by legislating the bullies out of hockey. The NHL is still grappling with the antibullying especially during the playoffs when it seems the refs forget their whistles.

 

If teams like Nashville can build teams that are competitive while having a self imposed budget, there should be no reason TO can't especially since TO usually exceeds the Cap. TO is ultra competitive now by signing JT but that signing is a hiccup in an orderly building of a team that may have long term ramifications. 

[WordsOfWisdom]

On 12/17/2018 at 3:36 AM, hobie said:

In the old NHL, 6 teams, the NHL was basically comprised of Canadians, Canada's population was 20 mil. and tho Canada is highly represented still, the NHL has players from the USA and Europe in ever increasing numbers. The pool from which players are coming to the NHL is more like 800 mil. now. Since the pool from which NHL players are coming from is so much bigger now it's very possible that the hockey we see now has more good players than ever before and the game we are seeing is actually superior.

 

I think you are correct.   

 

I guess my complaint is that even though the overall skill level has increased dramatically, the talent forms a "bell curve" with a handful of players at the top that are able to do something statistically impressive and a whole bunch of guys that (despite having loads of talent) cannot. When you spread those few top level players among all 31 teams then what you're left with is a team that has one or two good players and a bunch of guys that merely skate fast and shoot hard but don't accomplish anything. It creates mind numbing parity and makes all 31 teams equal in skill level. 

 

On 12/17/2018 at 3:36 AM, hobie said:

If teams like Nashville can build teams that are competitive while having a self imposed budget, there should be no reason TO can't especially since TO usually exceeds the Cap. TO is ultra competitive now by signing JT but that signing is a hiccup in an orderly building of a team that may have long term ramifications. 

 

I just don't like the idea of punishing a team for making smart decisions. Toronto signed Tavares (a smart move and a great acquisition) and the net result of that should be that they get to enjoy some success, not that they have to be punished with the loss of a key player coming up this off-season. 

 

If you're able to acquire the right mix of players (the hardest possible thing to do in pro sports), you should be able to keep those players for as long as you want to pay them. 

[hobie]

Dubie can do what I consider to be the dumbest move in the Cap world, over valuing the marginal. Giving Hy and Brown over 2 mil. is questionable and makes having enough dollars for the quality players difficult. I figure that both of those players shouldn't get much more than a million which means TO would have 2 to 2.5 million more for those that deserve it. On most teams Hy and Brown would be 3rd liners at best, on bad teams, but because of Babs' player utilization it seems credible that TO pay them so much.

 

I know 1 mil. in the sports world seems like minimum wage but it's still $1 million, poor them. 

[WordsOfWisdom]

On 12/23/2018 at 3:32 PM, hobie said:

Dubie can do what I consider to be the dumbest move in the Cap world, over valuing the marginal. Giving Hy and Brown over 2 mil. is questionable and makes having enough dollars for the quality players difficult. I figure that both of those players shouldn't get much more than a million which means TO would have 2 to 2.5 million more for those that deserve it. On most teams Hy and Brown would be 3rd liners at best, on bad teams, but because of Babs' player utilization it seems credible that TO pay them so much.

 

I know 1 mil. in the sports world seems like minimum wage but it's still $1 million, poor them. 

 

Since coaches like to roll four lines now with similar ice time, perhaps teams should just pay every player the league average.