LGD: A Night Filled With BJs

8 years ago

Here’s the deal. A regular season game against Columbus is probably not what’s on the minds of most Toronto sports fans tonight. Apparently the fourth game of what will be a disappointing 82 game marathon isn’t as sexxxy as Toronto team extinguishing a 22 year playoff drought.

Thankfully there are enough BJ’s to go around. You can take the popular set up of a laptop with the Leafs or Jays game on it while you watch the other on your TV. You can rely on the slow moving pace of baseball to periodically check in on what’s happening while watching the hockey game, or since this is a Leafs blog and you’re reading this instead of a Jays blog you can realize you probably don’t like baseball and just get swept up in the magic of Columbus Blue Jackets Hockey.

THE LEAFS

Another reason to watch the Leafs is that it seems like forever since they’ve actually played. A week off in the regular season is unheard of and the fact that it came at a time when the rest isn’t at all needed is proof that Toronto doesn’t get everything it wants when schedules are built.

The Leafs are looking for their first win under Mike Babcock still and that’s likely something we can copy and paste into the next few game previews because they haven’t shown any real sign of improvement.

Nevertheless, it will be nice to see this team again and I hope they are enjoying being off the radar in the Toronto sports scene because November will be a rude awakening.

Lineups via Dailyfaceoff.com

LW	C	RW
James van Riemsdyk	Tyler Bozak	Leo Komarov
Shawn Matthias	Nazem Kadri	Brad Boyes
Daniel Winnik	Nick Spaling	Joffrey Lupul
P.A. Parenteau	Peter Holland	Michael Grabner

Defensive Pairings
Jake Gardiner	Dion Phaneuf
Morgan Rielly	Matt Hunwick
Scott Harrington	Roman Polak

Exciting to see how these new pairings work out since the top four seems to make the most sense based on the small sample size of this season.

(Stats via HockeyAnalysis.com, most frequent D partners in grey)

THE BJs

It’s the Leafs story that’s been pumped all week. Finally the Leafs go up against the 30 goal scorer they abandoned in favour of scorching the earth.

Cat Silverman had some thoughts on Clarkson’s return earlier this week and a few fun facts:

Using the money that the Leafs would have seen counted against the cap for Clarkson, the team managed to sign one year deals for FOUR DIFFERENT PLAYERS
Those four players (Mark Arcobello, Brad Boyes, PA Parenteau, and Nick Spaling) combined for 48 goals last year. Clarkson had 5.
Those four players also combined for 118 points last year. Clarkson had 15.
Even if the we pretend the Leafs used Clarkson’s money to sign the two pricier free agents, instead (Daniel Winnik and Shawn Mattthias), that counts for 27 goals and 50 points.

The BJ’s have had an even worse start to their season than the Leafs (0-4-0) and have had higher expectations considering most of their impact players are healthy, they added Brandon Saad in an attempt to further improve, and generally are considered to be a playoff bubble team by anyone who hasn’t bothered to take a close look at their roster.

Lineups via DailyFaceoff.com

LW	C	RW
Brandon Saad	Ryan Johansen	Nick Foligno
Kerby Rychel	Boone Jenner	Cam Atkinson
Scott Hartnell	William Karlsson	Rene Bourque
Matt Calvert	Gregory Campbell	David Clarkson