Toronto Maple Leafs

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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Leafs PK and Offense Wilting Under Pressure

What a flurry of furious action that was.  No, I’m not referring to the end of the Leafs-Sabres game on Friday, I’m more looking at the coach and the press ripping into the team’s production of late.  They can’t stop anything on the PK, and they can’t score goals with the man advantage.  They’re pathetically out-gunned by the top teams in the NHL… wait a minute.  Philadelphia isn’t a top team is it?

Ok let’s think about that for a second.  Yes if the Leafs had beaten the Flyers they would have pulled even in the standings, but nobody in their right mind would argue that the Leafs talent level approaches that of the Flyers.  Philadelphia in fact have been painted as the league’s greatest disappointment so far this season, and with good reason.  Following the addition of Chris Pronger, many were picking them to challenge the Penguins for top spot in the Eastern conference this season.  They certainly didn’t live up to advance billing in the first half of the year, but since bringing in new coach Peter Laviolette, they’ve turned the corner and seem to be rounding back into playoff form.

Losing to the Flyers and the Sabres is not something anyone should be surprised by.  Add to that fact that the Leafs are missing their top defensive defender in Mike Komisarek, and two of their top centres, in Grabovski and Primeau, and suddenly you wonder why anyone EXPECTS them to win games.

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Leafs Take Blow(s) To Middle

It looks like the Leafs recent rocky road could be about to get rockier.  The losses of Mikhail Grabovski and Wayne Primeau to long term injury means the spell of recent offensive decline suffered by the team could be about to get far worse.

Grabovski and Primeau are likely to be replaced in the day to day line up by the likes of John Mitchell and Rickard Wallin.  Grabovski and Primeau had goal creation numbers of 0.20 and 0.05 respectively per game, while Mitchell and Wallin have goal creation numbers of 0.13 and 0.03 respectively.  That’s equivalent to replacing the equivalent of Thomas Vanek or Ryan Clowe in the Leafs line up with Matt Cooke or Marcel Goc.  In other words, it’s a bit of a drop off in the skill department.

In an effort to see the silver lining, it also means the Leafs will likely promote some players from the Marlies to take a look at further.  The most likely candidates would be Christian Hanson and perhaps Tyler Bozak or Ryan Hamilton.  Personally I would be most intrigued to see Bozak playing on a scoring line with the Leafs in order to see how far along his game has progressed (or regressed) in the AHL this season.

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Ian White’s Case For The Captaincy

Ok, I personally think it’s more than a tad premature to be foisting the C on any of these up and comers.  It was too soon for Stajan (he of the career high 55 points AFTER the talk of captaincy began), and it’s too soon for White (on PACE for a career year?).  Yes they are stand up soldiers, who do their job with regularity.  Unfortunately that doesn’t suddenly morph a player into captain material.  Here is a brief list of some previous Leaf captains, the age at which they were named captain, and some of their accomplishments PRIOR to being named captain:

Mats Sundin (1997-2008): Named Leafs captain at 26, Sundin had already registered seasons of 114, and 94 points, leading his previous team (the Quebec Nordiques) in scoring at the age of 21, while also registering a +21 rating and leading the Nords to a 47 win, 104 point season (more points than the Leafs have EVER registered in a single season).

He was the Leafs leading scorer in the previous two seasons, as a 23 and 24 year old, his first two with the club.  He was a 1st overall draft pick in the 1989 entry draft, and had captained the Swedish entry at the World Juniors.  He was a point per game player in the NHL playoffs, and he was better than a point per game player at the Men’s World Championships for Sweden.  In one Canada Cup, and one World Cup, Sundin had produced 13 points in 10 games, all before the age of 26.

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