On this wonderful day, the most glorious birth of TheLeafsNation.com, we are proud to introduce our first writers – the formidable Pension Plan Puppets. To mark the occasion, we thought we would have a chat with our newest Comrades in Arms. 

We’ve been called a lot of downright offensive things but ‘Justin Bieber’ might take the cake. We might have to reconsider this entire gig

*storms away from keyboard, reads contract, returns to keyboard*

Alright, well, maybe we won`t. Clearly you meant to compare us to one of the all-time Leafs greats that you got to grow up watching every Saturday night. Preferably Wendel Clark. Anyway, I can`t speak for Chemmy – because I can`t do his funny Connecticut accent – but I joined TheLeafsNation.com because it has always been my dream to write on every Leafs blog on the internet.

I have to give a special thanks to Jonathan Willis of OilersNation.com and Kent Wilson of FlamesNation.ca (I sense a pattern…wait, why is it Canucks Army? Because they don’t have enough fans to form a Nation) who assured me that working with mittenstringers and sports talk radio is not the worst thing to ever happen to them.

Keep in mind each also supports horrible Canadian franchises so there’s no telling the amount of psychological scarring present. They also mentioned what a great experience it had been to work with Supreme Leader Baron Wanye von Gretz.

On a semi-serious note, the novelty of ‘working’ alongside actual ‘professionals’ and the chance for another way to interact with the best fans in sports was more than enough to entice me over.

Well, my handle, while not very clever, is a short form for Pension Plan Puppets which is the blog that I’ve run since June 13th 2006. I started it out on Blogger and picked up my hetero blogging partner Chemmy and a host of other writers over the last three years as a part of SB Nation.

If you haven’t visited before then I have to seriously question your credentials as huge Leafs fans. You might recognize me from any number of sites that use me as a proxy for the average Leafs fan (sorry folks) or from my writing that has been published in local puppy training tool the Toronto Sun and the National Post although I was only aware of the latter.

I’ve been a fan of the Leafs since I could walk and I use my blog, and by extension this one, to discuss my favourite team. I’m not always (ever?) right but I approach things with an open mind and I hope that you’ll all do the same. I write because I love to talk about the Leafs. So far it’s been fun and a big part of that has been the great community we’ve built over at PPP. I hope to contribute to the same level of discussion here.

You’ll all be a big part of setting the tone for the site so I hope you’re up to the challenge.

I’d hesitate to guarantee improvement since after finishing 29th last year the team could do worse. I doubt that it will but until then I’ll keep my fingers crossed. The team’s goaltending won’t make you consider gouging out your eyes for the first time since the lockout which is a huge improvement.

The top two forward lines feature a lot of speed and skill in Phil Kessel, Tyler Bozak, Kris Versteeg, Mikhail Grabovski, and Nikolai Kulemin. The defence will, against all odds, likely continue to be a logic-defying adventure. Most importantly, Leafs fans can expect growing pains.

This team is one of the youngest in the league and will likely get younger as the year goes on. That means that we’re in for sophomore slumps, steep learning curves, and some (but not many) moral victories.

Along the way the team will hopefully have improved enough to give us our first taste of playoff hockey since Gary Bettman and the owners robbed the fans of a year of hockey.

Stephen Colbert has taught me that bears are the greatest threat to humanity. Maybe the tiger with crippling emotional anxiety could try to lull the bear into a false sense of sympathy with it’s timid shaking and frozen-in-fear visage.

Then again, if that’s it’s plan it would do well to remember that bears are Godless killing machines who have no true emotions and seek only to feast on the blood of their victims.

If that ain’t top drawer introductory introductions, we don’t know what is.