Toronto Maple Leaf Roster: Waiver Status

I don’t think the much discussed (and increasingly tiresome) term “truculence” will be the big issue for the 2009-2010 Maple Leafs. I think the Penalty Kill (discussed earlier here) and waiver rules are likely to have a far bigger impact on this team than their new found ferocity.

Why waivers? Well, as much as I mocked the notion of significant competition in Leafs camp, the Leafs have enough 4th line talent that it's almost certain the club will expose several players to get down to a 23 man roster.

Burke may have "lost" talent to the waiver wire in the past, but it's one thing to find marginal players an NHL home (e.g. Mark Bell, Staffan Kronwall) and quite another when it's a Mitchell, Frogren or Tlusty that's lost for nothing - especially if that player is lost so an aging vet can get 4th line minutes. (Mayers, Primeau and Allison - I'm looking at you.)

Forwards: 13 Spots and 18 Players

With 13 spots up for grabs, who are the locks at forward to make the line-up?

1. Jason Blake
2. Niklas Hagman
3. Mikhail Grabovski
4. Lee Stempniak
5. Alexei Ponikarovsky
6. Matthew Stajan
7. Nikolai Kulemin
8. Colton Orr

If the Leafs are going to carry 13 forwards, four of the following nine won’t make the club:

9. Christian Hanson
10. Jiri Tlusty
11. Tyler Bozak
12. Wayne Primeau
13. Jamal Mayers
14. Viktor Stalberg
15. Rickard Wallin
16. John Mitchell
17. Jason Allison

Keep in mind that Hanson, Bozak and Stalberg can all be sent to the Marlies without having to clear waivers, giving Burke a bit of early season flexibility. Tlusty too, although he loses his waiver exemption status once he plays 8 more NHL games (good thing JFJ burned a year of his eligibility so he could play him nine minutes a night in 14 games).

I didn’t forget him, but Nazem Kadri isn’t making this club. Even a nine game look (10 pro games and he burns a year of his contract) means exposing another player on the team and I can’t see that happening so an 18 year old can have his cup of coffee.

Numbers Game on D

If the Leafs carry 13 forwards, they have room for eight d-men. Book Komisarek, Kaberle, Beauchemin, Finger and Schenn (in no particular order) as the top five.

Who’s kidding who, Gunnarsson and Oreskovic aren't making this team out of camp. That means one of Frogren, Exelby, White and Van Ryn will be traded or waived. My guess is Van Ryn will be traded (or injured), failing that, Frogren will hit the waiver wire/ be demoted to the Marlies.

Vesa and the Monster

If you think Burke spent the off-season travelling repeatedly to Sweden to woo a guy to play for the Marlies, raise your hand.

That’s what I figured.

Joey Mac will be seeing a lot of Ricoh Coliseum this season.

Toronto Maple Leafs: Waiver Status by Position

Forwards

Player	Waiver Exempt?
Jason Blake	No
Niklas Hagman	No
Mikhail Grabovski	No
Lee Stempniak	No
Alexei Ponikarovsky	No
Matthew Stajan	No
Nikolai Kulemin	No
Wayne Primeau	No
Jamal Mayers	No
Colton Orr	No
Rickard Wallin	No
John Mitchell	No
Jason Allison	No
Tyler Bozak	Yes
Christian Hanson	Yes
Viktor Stalberg	Yes
Nazem Kadri	Yes
Jiri Tlusty	Yes - 8 games remaining

Defence

Player	Waiver Exempt?
Mike Komisarek	No
Tomas Kaberle	No
Francois Beauchemin	No
Jeff Finger	No
Mike Van Ryn	No
Garnet Exelby	No
Jonas Frogren	No
Ian White	No
Luke Schenn	Yes
Carl Gunnarsson	Yes
Phil Oreskovic	Yes

Goalies

Player	Waiver Exempt?
Vesa Toskala	No
Jonas Gustavsson	Yes
Joey MacDonald	No

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Went to the Leafs - Blues game last night, we were lucky enough to get my wife's corporate seats. Yup, corporate seats. I've been to four games this year and three of those were as the guest of large corporations on expense accounts. Which brings me back to this crazy concept that somehow Leaf fans are to blame for the current teams' woes.

Last night, I asked the people around me how they got their tickets ($160 reds). All of them are season tickets held by corporations - the guys to my right got their seats from a car dealership (the ticket holder apparently owns four dealerships); the foursome in front of me were from an ad agency; the two to their left were part of a restaurant chain; and the two to my wife's left were held by a big food multinational (who also have a box at the ACC).

This is something that Dave Feschuk picked up on over at the Star today; clearly it's not the average joe that's filling the coffers for MLSE and padding that oh so comfortable bottom line.

Malibu Stacy may tell us that "math is hard" but let's do a little rudimentary accounting.

The ACC has 1020 platinum seats at $400 each, which generates $400K per game (not including the margins from sushi and wine sales).

In the upper bowl there are approximately 3330 Purple Seats at $37 a pop, generating approximately $120K per game. Fold-in the 300 standing room places at $24 each and you've got an extra $7200 - call it $130K.

Time to compare and contrast: the purple dwelling Leafs Nation lunch box crowd is being outspent by the corporations in the platinums by about $3 to $1.

Put another way: one row of platinum seats generates more income for MLSE than all of the standing room tickets combined.

Now factor in 300 luxury suites. I don't know what the original purchase price or seat licensing costs were, but a 42 person suite rents out for $10K per game and a 57 person suite is $13K. The "cheaper" rental is the equivalent of selling 270 tickets up in the purples, more than 10 rows worth of seats.

So if you think refusing to buy the car flag, canceling Leafs TV and declining those $37 purples will make a difference, go for it. I honestly encourage Leaf fans to vote with their wallets. Seriously. After all, maybe Mike Babcock is right, - it is the common fan that's propping this organization up and keeping them from a re-build.

Looking at the numbers I find it very hard to believe it's so.

###

As for the game itself, Tlusty got banged around like it was the first time he played contact hockey, but I'll give him credit for getting up and staying in the thick of things all night. If he could find a second gear or any type of explosive speed he'd be a far more dangerous player. Tlutsy seemed to play the whole game at half-speed (or else his top speed is really poor). He could find the openings, but his lack of secondary speed kept him from been truly dangerous.

The Tucker, Blake, Stajan line really surprised me. Tucker was great on the forecheck (this from a guy who has pushed to trade #16 for years) but he's an absolute pylon defensively. Blake's through the legs back pass happened right in front of us and was amazing.

As I watched Legace stymie the Leafs time after time, I started undergoing serious cognitive dissonance - had JFJ signed Legace as a UFA, the Leafs would still have Rask plus their 2007 1,2,4 picks and likely would have made the playoffs last year. Of course, that would mean JFJ would still be GM giving me chronic heartburn by screwing this team over in new and inventive ways...

Speaking of Cox

I picked up a Toronto Star sports section that had been abandoned on the subway this morning. I probably should have stuck to my book.

I'm going to tread into CoxBloc territory here and I don't even know where to start. Cox assembles a rambling collection of "thoughts" on the Rangers-Leafs pre-game festivities; McCabe's gaffe; Tlusty's photos and comes to the strange conclusion that the Leafs have sold their soul.

Where to begin? Let's start with the pre-game shenanigans, in the print edition Cox writes:

Were [Stafford] Smythe around yesterday, the collective misbehaviour of today's Leaf millionaires would undoubtedly have made him throw up.

For starters, you had the team and one of the veterans it counts upon for mature leadership, Darcy Tucker, rapped on the knuckles and fined by the NHL for participating in a truly adolescent scene last Saturday night in the pre-game warm-up with the Rangers.

So in the print world of Mr. Cox, one would conclude that the skirmish must be a pretty big deal. It's the first page lead (or lede for your print-junkies) it includes an exhumation of poor Stafford Smythe, and it produces the usual smug indignation from Cox.

But over in the electronic world of the Star it's a bit of a different story.

In his on-line "blog" (which is just another 500 word column that the Star insists on calling a blog even thought it has all the intimacy and two-way communication of K-Fed and Britney's marriage with about half the intellect) Cox writes of the skirmish:

Everybody's up in arms about Sean Avery after Saturday night's Rangers-Leafs game, and to be sure this is a juicy story. But outrage? I don't think so. Peel away all the rhetoric and here's what you have: two guys pushed and shoved during the pre-game warm-up, said nasty things to each other and then fought during the first period. Big Deal.

I'd just like to know which one it is - blog=no big deal or front-page=lead item and big deal?

Flipping back to the print story, Cox concludes the Avery-Tucker skirmish with this odd thought:

Try as they might to make it all Sean Avery's fault, the Leafs were, essentially, found equally culpable in the idiotic episode.

The Rangers were fined $25,000 and the Leafs $10,000. Avery was fined $2,500 and Tucker was fined $1,000. The League said, "The unprofessional conduct of Avery in initiating this altercation...is the basis for this discipline....Tucker also bears some responsibility for his inappropriate response. "

So, the Rangers fines are 2.5x those of the Leafs. The League found that Avery was the initiator while Tucker only bears "some responsibility" and Cox concludes that the Leafs are "equally" culpable.

That's the strangest definition of "equal" I've ever encountered.

Next up: the McCabe give-away.

It was a bad pass. A horrific pass. A stupid play. Next...

Oh good, more moral indignation from Cox - just what we all needed - and this time it's poor Jiri Tlusty in the cross-hairs.

For those of you living under a rock, the kid took some naked photos of himself and emailed them to a woman, who promptly posted them all over the web. The fact that the Toronto media are only picking up on this today (it's the front page of the Toronto Sun) tells me these guys need to trade in their dial-up modems and check out this thing called the world-wide-web. Deadspin broke the Tlusty story on November 8 and it's been on Leaf discussion boards for days. That's a long time in this world of 24 hour news cycles and breaking stories, yet Cox only brings his faux-moral indignation to the table today, he writes:

...if this was a team of pride and tradition, Tlusty wouldn't have been in the lineup last night and Leaf ownership wouldn't have been hiding behind a press release.
The youngster would be back in the minors, having disgraced what was once a Canadian institution – a team that once had a member of Parliament in its lineup – with his amateur porn shots. Ownership, meanwhile, would be vowing to make certain such foolishness never reoccurred.

Really? A teenager sends a naked photo and he's disgraced a Canadian institution? For posing naked he should be sent to the minors? Is once having a member of Parliament in its lineup really the best indicator of quality? Has Cox ever watched question period? What's a bigger disgrace to the Leaf brand - a teenage prospect posing naked for a cell-phone photo or a paedophile ring being run out of Maple Leaf Gardens? Hmm...so many questions.

Sure Tlutsy was rather misguided in sending those photos, but to call for his demotion in order to protect the Leaf brand - a brand that is somewhat sullied after 40 years of losing, managerial incompetence, criminal behaviour and other assorted f*ck ups is a bit rich.

That said, I do look forward to future columns from Cox calling for the suspension of Garth Snow for encouraging hot (well, hottish) girl on girl action. Keeping Robbie Schremp buried in the AHL for his frightening photos in a bad thong. Shutting down the NBA for the way players interact with fans (some of those guys are married!). The elimination of NFL franchises in Cincinnati and Minnesota (surely Cox would call for Fred Smoot to be sent out to sea, alone on an ice floe) and the future of Isiah Thomas outside of sports, perhaps as a squeegee kid.

Look, I'm not saying that athletes shouldn't be held to the same standards as the rest of us. I'm not saying that Tlusty didn't make a mistake and I'm not saying there isn't a place for some sort of moral decency.

But I'm sick of Cox being all incensensed and sanctimonious over what are essentially mistakes. A teenager posed naked; McCabe blew a pass; Tucker and Avery had a little spat - is this really the right fodder for the front page of a sports section? Can one really tie these things together and conclude that a franchise has lost it's soul? Is this really the best that Cox can do?

As an aside, didn't the Leafs sell their soul back in the 70s? I'm pretty sure you can only sell your soul once. It's just like the "city losing it's innocence" trope that lazy media types love to trot out - once that innocence is gone, just like one's soul - there's no getting it back.

As for Cox, if this is the best he can do and he honestly believes that last night was some sort of tipping point or threshold for the Leafs, it's time he heeded his own advice to McCabe and considers a move to a new market to ply his trade.