God, this season seems weird, doesn’t it? Looking at the Leafs sitting outside of a playoff spot going into the all-star break when it feels like they were reeling off win after win just a couple weeks ago really makes it difficult to get a handle on what this team is doing, or more importantly,…
With the holiday season now fully in the rear-view and a bit of an auto-pilot portion of the season upcoming, naturally it’s time to take a very early look at the trade deadline. I mean, the next best off-ice thing to look forward to in the coming weeks will be all-star selections, so what else…
“Source: ~90% of the Leafs were relieved to see Mike Babcock go” is what James Mirtle of The Athletic tweeted out on Thursday morning before the Leafs got ready for their first game under new coach Sheldon Keefe. If that doesn’t tell you that things were much worse under the hood of this team than…
The Leafs (in this case meaning Shanahan and Dubas) sort of wanted to fire Mike Babcock last spring when the Bruins put them away in game seven. They didn’t, and instead did the most common next thing: replacing the assistants around him. But it’s hard to parse out who pulled the strings most in this…
If the Leafs continue to sputter over the next month or so (they’re currently 12th in the conference standings by points-percentage), Mike Babcock is going to be fired. Before Christmas, after, it doesn’t really matter; If this Toronto team just claws along with two wins here, two losses there, Babcock is going to be replaced by…
“They’re a young team” gets tossed around an awful lot in pro sports, no? “Ahh, cut this team some slack. They’re young, still learning to win”. I mean, you’ve got to learn to win, otherwise I’m assuming you’d just spend all your time learning to lose. Not a place any team wants to be. But…
Person 1: “Cody Ceci is bad. He shouldn’t even be in the NHL.” Person 2: “I don’t know. I mean, maybe you’re right. He has been on some really poor Sens teams though.” Person 1: “Nope, he’s terrible. The numbers say he’s always been getting crushed in shot-attempt share, and he’s 26 now. He is…
Well, this is it. Hockey is back this week. The Leafs have made pretty much all their final cuts in preparation for their season opener tomorrow night against the Senators, and that means it’s time for us to get some last-minute preview content out the door before the games mean something. With that in mind,…
In case you haven’t heard, Rasmus Sandin is a Toronto Maple Leaf. In what became easily the biggest story of camp these last two weeks and stretching back over the last year, the 2018 first-rounder shot up the organization like a rocket to nab a NHL roster spot and will make his debut a couple…
With the obvious caveat that we shouldn’t read too much into preseason game results, this training camp for the Leafs has been interesting in a few ways. Toronto had significant roster turnover in the summer, and with these new faces like Spezza, Barrie, Kerfoot, and Ceci, there was a lot to take in about how…
The Leafs are going to do a few things differently this season, so you can go ahead and make peace with that. The roster has had its fair share of turnover, but tactically we can expect to see some new things as well. Out are assistant coaches DJ Smith and Jim Hiller, in are Paul…
Yesterday Katya Knappe at Pension Plan Puppets published a very good piece about the Marner situation that does exactly as its title says: Blows away the smoke, and shows that his choice is actually quite simple. The basic premise is that, as the Leafs get closer to opening night on October 2nd, the way they’ve…
