Absolutely, The Leaf’s Madness Bracket Play-ins

Welcome to day one of our tournament to determine the greatest Leaf in the eyes of extremely online Leafs fans. Today we’re starting off with our long shots, the play-ins.

Frank Mahovlich is awaiting his first round rival, and he’ll be facing off against either Hap Day or Bobby Baun

Hap Day has pretty much filled every role you could possibly ask a player, coach, executive to fill and he’s won in each of those roles.

He goes up against the Stanley Cup legend that is Bobby Baun. Since I was a child I heard the tale of Baun recovering from an injury to return and score the game winning goal for the Leafs, and while it may now be considered reckless to put a once in a lifetime moment over addressing an injury, the story lives on in lore and this should be an interesting matchup.

Curtis Joseph in the three seed is awaiting his rival, and at this point I can assure you that it will be a Russian. It’s just a matter of whether it will be Dmitri Yushkevich or Sergei Berezin.

Yushkevich is the defenseman we all wish the Leafs had now. Defensively responsible, hits like a truck, and had enough skill that you didn’t hate him for being primarily a defensive defenseman.

Berezin now would be a Corsi God. He never met the shot he didn’t want to take and at times that worked really well for him. When he got put with players who could make up for his shortcomings he looked pretty good. At the very least he was fun.

Auston Matthews, not surprisingly, received the most votes of any player in the tournament and is probably the favourite going into this tournament. We’ll make his trip to the Final Four a little more interesting by having him go up against either Matt Stajan or Clarke MacArthur in round one.

Neither Stajan or MacArthur are going to give Matthews any real competition, but Stajan has local boy status and MacArthur created some really fun moments and seeing both these players get enough votes to make it into the bracket made me feel good.

After today we drop our bracket from 67 to 64 and start this thing for real, and given the circumstances it seems only fitting that we will visit The Darkest Timeline region tomorrow. Happy voting, and let us know your takes in the comments.