Toronto Maple Leafs

New Leafs To Play Consecutive Games Vs. Devils

Trial by fire.  That should be something the new Leafs are used to, they did play for the Calgary Flames after all.  Even J.S. Giguere was a Flame once upon a time, so it seems fitting that the new look Leafs will be skating in two consecutive games against one of the top teams in the Eastern Conference.

Dion Phanuef was skating with Francois Beauchemin and joined Tomas Kaberle on the top pairing for the PP, at various points in yesterday’s practice. Meanwhile Fredrik Sjostrom was skating on a line alongside Rickard Wallin and Nikolai Kulemin, while the Leafs focused their offensive tools on a top line that saw Alexei Ponikarovsky join Tyler Bozak and Phil Kessel.  Lee Stempniak skated along with John Mitchell and the out of place Jeff Finger, who will likely be replaced with Christian Hanson before tomorrow night’s game.

That leaves Wayne Primeau, Colton Orr, and Jay Rosehill on the 4th line for the Leafs and the remaining D were Luke Schenn, Carl Gunnarsson, and Garnet Exelby.

The Leafs face a Devils squad that was led by Zach Parise and Travis Zajac to victory slightly less than a week ago.  Hopefully new starting goalie J.S. Giguere can channel some of his Conn Smythe magic in facing down the team he won that trophy against eons ago.  Jonas Gustavsson will be the backup for the rest of the season, eventually alternating starts after the Olympic Break when the schedule condenses more.

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Burke “Open For Business”

So it looks like we finally have a new Maple Leafs squad.  I’m not sure it’s the one we envisioned Brian Burke cobbling together slowly through the draft, but it certainly isn’t the one he took over halfway through last season from Cliff Fletcher.

Earlier today, Brian Burke, Dave Nonis, et al pulled the trigger on two large moves that change the face of the Leafs franchise for the foreseeable future.  Outgoing are career Leafs Matt Stajan and Ian White, as well as more recent free agent acquisitions Niklas Hagman, Jamal Mayers, Jason Blake, and Vesa Toskala.  In return the Leafs have obtained Dion Phaneuf, Fredrik Sjostrom, and Keith Aulie from the Calgary Flames and J.S. Giguere from the Anaheim Ducks.

In my last posting, I listed 11 things the Leafs have, and 5 things they badly needed.  Of the 11, the only one they “gave up” was their top 4 RFA D man Ian White.  Of the 5 things they badly needed, they addressed 2 and a half of them.  They improved the offensive D man role by grabbing a potential future Norris candidate in Phaneuf; they got a speedy checking line winger in Sjostrom (that’s the 1/2 issue); and they grabbed a 1A goalie in Giguere.

I’d say that’s a pretty good job on Brian Burke’s part.  Now they just need to add a scoring power forward on the wings, and some time for all these younger players to develop, and they could be a pretty awesome Brian Burke team in the not to distant future (3 or 4 years).

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Where The Leafs Stand

So we know the Leafs will be sellers at the trade deadline.  Frankly we’ve known that since we were 10 games into the season when it was abundantly clear the team was likely out of the playoff race.  Despite the fits and spurts of positive play (as few and far between as they have been), there was really no hope of the team climbing out of the hole it had dug for itself.

So where does that leave things?  Well, despite what many have opined in recent days/weeks, the Leafs DO have some solid young pieces to their puzzle, and the fact that they aren’t winning immediately does not automatically mean there is zero hope for the future.

Pundits tend to have a very short sighted view of the overall NHL picture.  They think in terms of who is good right now, and usually they rationalize ex post facto.  That is to say, they look for the causes behind the success stories rather than trying to predict the success stories before they arise, because frankly they suck at that.  If you think about where most of the pundits predicted the Oilers finishing, and/or NHL fans, there was a chance the Oilers were going to be fighting for a playoff spot… sort of like the Leafs were supposed to… remember?

Of course all those amazingly adept prognosticators (myself included) missed horribly, especially when you factor in that nobody expected Phoenix, Colorado, or the Islanders to be as competitive as they have been.  Dave Tippet in Phoenix, a healthy line up of young rookies playing for Joe Sacco in Colorado, and some magic from Roloson, Tavares, and Moulson on Long Island, have teamed up to make those 3 teams a bit better than the likes of Toronto, Edmonton, and Carolina.

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Ian White’s Draft Year

Good for the D apparently.  2002 was a bumper crop.  Jay Bouwmeester, Duncan Keith, Ryan Whitney, Joni Pitkanen, Keith Ballard, Denis Wideman, Tom Gilbert, James Wisniewski, Trevor Daley, Denis Grebeshkov, and yes… Toronto’s Ian White.

Here’s the thing though, White stands out a tad along with Wideman.  White was selected 191st overall in the 6th round, while Wideman was selected 241st overall in the 8th round.  Nobody anticipated either player being likely to record over 250 games in the NHL when they were 18 in other words.  Both have gone on to play over 290 NHL games, and record over 100 points each.

In fact, Wideman’s 149 points ranks him 5th out of all the D men selected in the 2002 draft, behind (in order) Bouwmeester, Pitkanen, Whitney, and Keith.  Keith Ballard follows Wideman with 137 points, and the 7th highest point total is owned by Ian White at 103 points.

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Leafs Squeak By

Well, it was nice to see some offensive output from Niklas Hagman, Alexei Ponikarovsky, Matt Stajan, and Phil Kessel in the Leafs 4-3 victory over Nashville.  The Leafs haven’t gotten ANY scoring from those guys in FOREVER… or have they?

Matt Stajan: 3G, 4A, 7P in his last 8 games.  That’s pretty damn close to a point per game, and that’s with the team hardly scoring any points.  He’s being productive.

Alexei Ponikarovsky: 3G, 1A, 4P in his last 8 games (he went without a point in the 5 games previous to the last one).  He’s seen a few hiccups recently, but he looked solid against the Predators tonight at both ends of the ice.  He’ll still be a commodity at the trade deadline.

Niklas Hagman: 2G, 2A, 4P in his last 18 games.  WTF???  This guy is the 3rd leading scorer amongst the Leafs forwards and he has 4 points in his last 18 games.  That’s kinda crazy.  He has 17 goals, and is still on pace to score 28 or so, but yikes.  18 game cold streaks are best avoided by scoring forwards.

Phil Kessel: 1G, 5A, 6P in his last 5 games.  Jeez so much for the Kessel can’t produce offense theory.  He’s obviously doing SOMETHING offensively.

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Crunch Time

I apologise for my lack of regular postings since the end of the holiday season.  It is the end of Semester and we are down into “crunch time” for most of my students, and helping them to obtain credits and doing my marking both trump writing about a deplorably inept Maple Leafs squad.

While recently pathetic offensively, the true problems have always lay in goal and on the defensive end of the equation.  Friday night’s game against Washington, while apparently another point in the contiguous Leaf descent into failure as a team, actually lay outside the norm for a number of reasons though.

The Leafs out shot the Caps, which the Leafs have normally done this season.  The Leafs went down by a score of 2-0 (and eventually a lot more), which they have done far too often this year.  The Leafs couldn’t stop their opponent’s power play, and they couldn’t really do much on their own, which again, are both hallmarks of this season.

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Young Leafs Look Solid

So the young #1 line of the Leafs played pretend at being a top line in the NHL earlier tonight.  Phil Kessel, Nikolai Kulemin, and Tyler Bozak combined for 2 goals, 5 points, 9 shots, and a +6 rating against the Philadelphia Flyers.  Bozak’s goal was probably the prettiest effort a Leaf has scored since last season’s goal by Hagman against the Panthers where he deked out half their team.  Kessel didn’t score a goal, but he registered 2 assists, with the second of the pretty set up variety, as he fed Kulemin for a gimme.

Bozak now has 4 points in his first 3 games in the NHL, while Kulemin has 3 goals and 2 assists in his last 6 games.  Kessel also seems prepared to awake from his offensive slumber as he has registered 4 assists in his last 3 games.  Despite a lack of goals from Kessel, points are points, and his ability to create offense is more important to the Leafs than anything.

In essence, the young offensive players on the Leafs led the charge against a physical Flyers squad.  Jay Rosehill also contributed, scoring a goal that was called back due to a glove, and adding a couple of minor penalties en route to the win.  In the end, even Vesa Toskala did his part, registering his first shut out of the season against the same Flyers squad that lit up Jonas Gustavsson roughly a week ago.

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Leafs Can’t Get Much Worse

There’s some good news coming for Leafs fans.  They’re soon going to see less of the likes of Garnet Exelby and Jeff Finger on the blue line.  They might actually see some more scoring up front amongst their forwards.  They might even see some wins in the near future.

All of this is likely to come to pass when Carl Gunnarsson and Mike Komisarek return from injury, and hopefully not far in the future when Mikhail Grabovski rejoins the team.  Tyler Bozak looked like a solid producer on the top line with Kessel and Kulemin, and despite what Bill Watters thinks of his size problems (which I too have some concerns about), he was actually quite decent in his own end, and he set Kessel up with some gift wrapped offensive opportunities against the Hurricanes.

So let’s see, the Leafs will replace Finger and Exelby with Gunnarsson and Komisarek, thus reducing the minute load on Luke Schenn, Tomas Kaberle, Ian White, and Francois Beauchemin in the process.  That should help the squad out a tad defensively.  It might not cure all their problems, but it certainly won’t hurt to have another competent puck handler on the back end, and a shut down D man with size that blocks a lot of shots.

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Tyler Bozak Promoted

The Leafs have promoted Tyler Bozak to centre a line that had Rickard Wallin centring Phil Kessel and Nikolai Kulemin in practice yesterday.  With Wallin being taken off that line, it remains to be seen who Wilson will actually be dropping from the Leafs line up.

The Bozak promotion can only be seen as a signal from management to the Leafs incumbent forward corps that the recent offensive production is far from acceptable.  5 power play goals scored in the last 14 games on 44 opportunities for an 11.36% success rate = unacceptable. Phil Kessel has 1 goal in his last 12 games, while Niklas Hagman hasn’t scored in 8 games and Viktor Stålberg hasn’t scored in 9.  That’s a tad worrying, but luckily Stajan, Ponikarovsky, Stempniak, Blake, and Kulemin have contributed goals recently.

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Toskala Killing PK

Even after the last 4 games in which Gustavsson has played, where the Leafs have given up 6 power play goals on 14 opportunities for a 57.1% kill rate, the Leafs still maintain a 77% kill rate with the lanky Swedish netminder in goal.  Prior to the game against Philadelphia, the Leafs were killing 79.3% of the short handed situations they found themselves in when Gustavsson was between the pipes.  On the season he has allowed 16 power play goals in 69 short handed situations.

Toskala remains a large part of the problem with the Leafs PK.  Despite the fact that many of the goals are not his “fault”, he still remains the goalie of record for a ridiculous number of power play goals against: 26 in 64 short handed situations for a 59.3% kill rate.  Toskala has allowed 10 more goals in 5 fewer time short handed.

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