First Leaf Goals of the Year: 1995-2010

Each new hockey season supposedly brings with it plenty of hope for the faithful. After the debacle that was the first 10 games of the 2009-10 Leaf season, I'll happily forego hope and settle for relief.

It was great to see the Leafs get their first win right out of the gate. I never would have guessed that Tim Brent would be the first Leaf to light the lamp. Here's a quick look at who scored the Leafs' first goal of the season since 1995:

Year	First Leaf Goal
1995-96	Zdenek Nedved
1996-97	Mike Craig
1997-98	Igor Korolev
1998-99	Sergei Berezin
1999-2000	Mats Sundin
2000-2001	Jonas Hoglund
2001-2002	Alexander Mogilny
2002-2003	Alexander Mogilny
2003-2004	Nik Antropov*
Lockout
2005-06	Bryan McCabe
2006-07	Mats Sundin
2007-08	Nik Antropov
2008-09	Pavel Kubina
2009-10	Alexi Ponikarovsky
2010-11	Tim Brent

*The Leafs were shut-out by the dreaded Montreal Canadiens in the 2003 season opener, Nik Antropov had the first Leaf goal of the season in game two against the Washington Captials.


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Five Questions (Cross-posted at PPP)

Every 7 to 10 days I post a "Five Questions" entry over at uber Leaf Blog Pension Plan Puppets. Here's the latest entry...

When I was in university I rented a ramshackle five bedroom house from a little old Chinese lady who insisted we call her Yee.

I have no idea if that was her first name or her last name. We made our cheques out to "cash."

Yee always said her name so loudly and cheerfully it should have had an exclamation mark appended to it.

She was a great landlord. Each month when she came to collect the rent cheques she’d bring the five of us gifts. Sometimes a giant bag of fortune cookies, other times some apples or maybe some sticky rice. It was always food and, as impovrished students, it was always welcome.

Occasionally we would awake to find the house full of Chinese girls scrubbing the kitchen and polishing our floors. We weren’t the cleanest fellows I guess, but Yee assured us that we were "nice boys" and better tenants than the previous ones who apparently put a motorcycle through the front window.

All that for $272 a month each (in 1993 dollars).

My housemates from those days are now living in various cities across Canada. For the past 10+ years, each spring we’ve picked a city somewhere in North America and agreed to meet up.

More importantly, each and every year we claim we’re going to have a contest to see how many McDonald’s burgers we can eat in an hour. No fries, no shakes, just a giant pile of burgers and 60 minutes of gluttony.

I have no idea where the idea for this challenge came from, but like all things involving a group of men there’s a huge amount of bragging, trash talking and general idiocy involved.

Unfortunately, each year this all important contest falls apart in the rules process (what can I say - three of my former roomies are lawyers). Someone won’t eat the pickles, and of course if they’re not going to eat the pickles then we all have to get our burgers without the pickles. Oh, and maybe the onions. No onions across the board. And what about cheeseburgers instead of regular burgers?

Bah.

I know we’re never going to answer the age old question of just how many burgers each of us can each consume in 60 minutes. I just hope that on my death bed I’m not left wondering if I could have emerged victorious or if I would have puked near the Playland.

I figure I could eat 12 burgers easy. Who couldn’t eat 12 of those tiny morsels?

I think 15 would be the start of a bad stretch.

At 17 I’d know I was in trouble.

At 18, I’d have consumed twice my recommended daily caloric intake, 144 grams of fat and 378% of my daily sodium requirement.

Each and every burger past the 20 mark would carry some sort of punishing retribution, a mark of Cain (or is it McCain’s?) to be borne until the grease was purged from my system.

All of this burger talk leads to the first of this week’s all important questions: It’s well known that Alexi Ponikarovski is the Leafs’ resident McDonald’s man. Pending UFA Centre and former Leaf almost-great Nik Antropov is all about the Boorger King (that’s Russian for Burger King). Given their love of burgers…

Question 1: Do you think the Leafs should pursue Antropov this off-season? And as an all-important follow-up: how many McDonald’s burgers do you think you could eat in an hour (with full toppings, none of this hold the pickles crap).

* * *

The bad news: former Leaf Gary Leeman won the Stanley Cup with the Montreal Canadiens in 1993. This may not mean much to those of you who weren’t around for Leeman’s stint with the Leafs back in the 1980s, but he was not the most popular guy in town and far from the most popular guy in the room. Let’s just say bad rumours and ill will abound.

The good news: Leeman didn’t play enough regular season or playoff games with the Habs to qualify to have his name inscribed on the ultimate sports trophy.

Question 2: If you could excise one name from the Stanley Cup - one name that would be erased from the history books, internet databases, and disappear from the surface of the cup itself - which name would go? Who would you remove?

* * *

He’s on his third coach in three years. His team has gone out in the first round of the playoffs every year since the lockout. He mismanaged the cap so badly his team couldn’t even dress a full roster, icing just 10 forwards against Minnesota.

He signed the so-called franchise goalie to $6M cap hit through 2013 along with a no-movement clause, only to see said goalie continue to put up ever worsening numbers since his Vezina win in 2006.

This is a guy that dealt for Adrian Aucoin, a d-man with two destroyed groins and a $4M cap hit.

The team is carrying $48M in salaries with at least five roster positions still to be filled.

Question 3: If Darryl Sutter did this while GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs, how many 24 hour specialty channels would be launched? How many dedicated news paper sections would be printed? How many column inches spent? Is there even a unit of measure that could capture the resulting media storm? How is this man still employed?

* * *

I just found out that when Pierre McGuire called Luke Schenn "the Human Eraser" he was copping the nickname from Marvin "The Human Eraser" Webster, a former NBA centre who clocked in at 7' 1" and was known for his shot-blocking abilities.

Other recent disappointments in the nickname game include "Schenner" – the handle appointed to Braydon Schenn (as I posted in the comments at PPP, at least it’s better than "Schenny").

Whatever happened to quality handles like Killer, Charlie Hustle, the Baby Faced Assassin, the Popcorn Kid, the China Wall, or Leo "Snake Hips" Boivin?

Question 4: Which Leaf has the best nickname, which has the worst? Who needs a new nickname and will Jiri "NSFW" Tlusty ever really take off?

* * *

I’m not much of a baseball fan. Once or twice a year I’ll watch a game on TV. I don’t really follow the standings nor do I have a favourite team. I hate the Sky Dome Rogers Centre with its cement sterility and the huge distance between the fans and the field.

I do like the sound of a game on the radio in the evening though. Once my kids are in bed, there's something to be said for sipping a beer or a Black Bush on the rocks while I sit on the back deck - the more silence and game sounds, the better.

Baseball may also have the greatest stories. Bull Durham is one fantastic movie (we jokingly call our boy Nuke and he even has his own Durham Bulls hat), Ball Four is one of my favourite books and Money Ball really should be required reading for sports fans.

One of my favourite sports stories comes from former Kansas City Royal George Brett.

When he was asked about his ideal last at bat, the last time he'd ever step up to the plate, Brett said, "I want to hit a routine grounder to second and run all out to first base, then get thrown out by a half step. I want to leave an example to the young guys that that's how you play the game, all out."

Could you get a better answer? Seriously.

Here’s a guy that may be the greatest all-time third basemen in the history of the sport, an automatic hall of famer who put up huge numbers throughout his career and he wants to go down hustling out a routine play to first.*

Question 5: Ideally, what would your last shift as a professional athlete be?

* * *

*For the record, Brett’s final at bat came against the Texas Rangers. Brett was on a hitless streak and, in a scene right out of Bull Durham, the Rangers’ catcher Ivan Rodriguez told Brett the pitcher, former Jay Tom Henke, would be throwing nothing but fastballs. Four pitches later, Brett singled up the middle. Gary Gaetti later hit a home run and Brett's final act on a major league diamond was to touch home plate.

Team Softness = Injuries?

At the conclusion of last year's season, JFJ and MLSE threw around the meme that the Leafs "lost the most man games in the NHL due to injury" like JFJ threw around no-movement and no trade clauses.

At the time, I had a big problem with that that statement as:

1. I hate excuses (I think what-ifs and excuses were the cornerstones of the JFJ era)
2. If you look at the bulk of last year's injuries, they were to fringe players (Wozniewski was 17% of the total; 4th liners and Marlies were another 22%)
3. Good teams find ways to win, even when their big guys are hurting

What I didn't stop to consider was why the Leafs were so banged up.

After getting physically manhandled by Washington two nights in a row, the Leafs are once again threatening to run away with the injury title. It struck me that maybe the Leafs suffer so many injuries because they're a soft team.

Last year it was a sea of white shirts staring at their skate laces after Janssen laid out Kaberle.

The last two nights nobody laid a finger on Erskine and Eminger and the questionable hits (and one lovely end of game spear) kept on coming. Poni and Steen are both out as a result and White and Antropov were lucky to avoid the IR...

I'm far too lazy to crunch the numbers, but it would be interesting to see how many of the man games lost over the past 100+ games were the result of other teams playing big while the Leafs played small...

The Missing Years

Like pucks lazily drifting past Andrew Raycroft, the reasons for JFJ to be fired are almost too many to count.

The surprise isn't that JFJ’s teams will set a Leaf record for futility by missing the playoffs for three straight years.

The surprise isn’t that a team tagged by its coach as his most talented ever and positioned for a Stanley Cup run is mired in 27^th and on the cusp of a lottery pick.

The surprise isn’t that JFJ took a 100 point franchise and turned it into a soft, underperforming team, handcuffed it with long-term contracts, maxed out the cap and then stripped of its few assets for spare parts.

The surprise is that despite of all this, JFJ lasted as long as he did.

The man was the GM of my favourite team for five years. For half a decade, I watched him run a franchise I’ve followed all of my life and I still don’t have a clue what he was trying to do.

He arrived heralding the stockpiling of picks, but in five years, he traded the teams’ top pick three times and the second pick twice.

He spoke about a new era in developing talent, yet his top pick is playing four minutes a night in the NHL instead of getting big minutes in the minors.

I know that he liked to roll the dice. JFJ habitually sought to acquire high-risk high-reward players like Lindros, Allison, Raycroft, and O’Neill. And in every single case, the risk won. Under JFJ there was never a reward in Leaf land.

For every good contract he signed – Kaberle, Antropov, Poni, Sundin – he signed a bad one: Belfour, Domi, Blake, Kubina, McCabe, Tucker.

People claim his true talent was an eye for waiver wire pick-ups, landing Devereaux, Kilger and Moore. But for every fourth line surprise, there was a fourth line bust: Czerkawski, Pohl, Battaglia, Newbury, Suglabov.

Want to measure his supposed ability to assess talent? Count the number of JFJ acquisitions who can no longer find work in the NHL: Allison, Battaglia, Belfour, Berg, Czerkawski, Green, Khavanov, Lindros, O’Neill, and Slugablov.

I dare anyone to find a comparable list of post-lockout busts signed by a single GM.

In the end, he may be a great guy, a wonderful father and husband. He may have been classy when he knew his time had come, but he set the team I love back years. His incompetence or inability to stand up to the board (or some deadly combination of both) has handcuffed this club for years to come. And for that, I am glad that he’s gone.

He left with the media remarking on his class and his ability to keep his head up. His image ironically buffed by the same mouth breathers and one-fingered typists who called for his head and spent the last month in a daily vigil outside the MLSE boardroom door waiting for the blue and white smoke signaling a new Pope Leafs GM.

JFJ often said he was a reflection of his record, and that’s likely the only spot that he and I will ever agree. If ever there was a truly .500 GM – a man that won as often as he lost – JFJ is it.

In the Reds

I don't normally do the game notes/blog thing but I got a call around 5PM tonight from a friend asking if I was interested in going to the Leaf game, like he had to ask.

Here are some notes from the ACC:

When Andy Frost announced the game’s scratches, Antropov’s name got a big cheer.

The music selection at the ACC is worse than you might think. I don’t know that Cotton Eyed Joe made an appearance, but the majority of the music played was recorded before the births of Steen, Stajan and Ponikarovsky. I didn’t know that people still listened to Quiet Riot…I bet the guy next to me we’d hear Twisted Sister before the night was over. I lost. But it seemed like a safe bet at the time.

Both teams came out sluggish. The Leafs didn’t get their first shot on goal until the 13th minute mark and that was off a dump in.

Ponikarovsky’s goal was a thing of beauty. Too bad he couldn’t repeat in the shoot-out.

The Leafs looked absolutely dreadful in the second period. They were totally contained for whole shifts at a time, unable to contain the Rangers low-cycle and unable to clear the zone. The Rangers very successfully dumped the puck into the Leafs right corner and then flooded the right wing wall. The Leafs coughed up the puck time after time after time. It was ugly.

Raycroft did not look sharp. Pucks were bouncing off him like superballs dropped from the top of the CN Tower. He was fighting the puck all night and if it weren’t for a few lucky bounces the Rangers could have buried the Leafs in the second, especially as Raycroft struggled to contain the puck and limit second chances.

Stajan can dangle. Made a great move up the middle in the 3rd. Who knew?

Maurice did his best to pair Belak with Kaberle, but the Rangers did a great job of isolating Belak and working the puck into his corner whenever big #3 took to the ice.

Brendan Bell did not look out of place - had a really nice solo rush in the third that he nearly converted.

The Leafs seemed reticent to shoot the puck tonight and were guilty of over-passing on a few occasions. I’m amazed they managed 38 shots on Lundqvist. It’s either a friendly finger keeping count or the Leafs should have had 50.

PruchaTyutin crushed Tucker. Tucker crushed Jagr. Nice stuff.

Whenever Raycroft left the crease to play the puck, a woman in my section would make a noise like she was going into labour (either that or she secretly using the call of the dying giraffe). Thank you miss, whoever you are, for giving voice to the anxiety that I thought was mine alone.

Marcel Hossa really low-bridged Poniarovsky with a very dangerous looking hit in the neutral zone. If Quinn was still coach (or if Lindy Ruff were behind the bench) this would be the lead news item until at least Tuesday.

The Leafs looked better as the game went on, dominating most of the third. With the exception of one shift in OT, the Rangers looked as though they were just waiting for the shoot-out.

The guy sitting behind me very loudly predicted what each player would do as they came in on the shoot-out. He fared a little worse than the leafs going 0 for six on his predictions. My favourite: his call that Shanahan would go “High cheese over the glove” on Raycroft. High cheese indeed.

I’ve never enjoyed the shoot-out on TV and I hate to admit it was a pretty thrilling thing to see live. That said, I still think it’s a lousy way to decide a game.

SOL

Make it 3-7 in shootouts for the Blue and White this year as they go down to the Bruins 3-2.

The Leaf shooters are now officially 4 for 24 on these game-deciding breakaway contests.

Boston went 2 for 2 in the irony column with Czerkawski opening the scoring and Boyes putting the Leafs on ice in the shootout.

Once again, I have to wonder why Quinn went with the Sundin, Tucker and Ponikarovsky trifecta. If I was at the craps table with Quinn holding the dice, I'd be wagering on the don't pass bet. I also have to wonder how a supposedly hungry team opens the game with 2 shots in the first 20 minutes. What did they think this was, a game 7 against New Jersey?

To date, here's how the Leafs have fared this season (and if anyone can fill me in on how to remove the three miles of blank space between this sentence and my table, I'd be really grateful.)

Player	Shots	Goals	Shooting %
Sundin	7	1	14.2%
Ponikarovsky	5	1	20%
Tucker	4	1	25%
Lindros	3	1	33.3%
Allison	3	0	0%
Wellwood	1	0	0%
O'Neill	1	0	0%