TLN Monday Mailbag: November 14th

The best way to minimize your own stress levels is to minimize the stress of those surrounding you. That might be some personal experience, that might be empathy for anybody who plays with Roman Polak, I’m not quite sure which just yet. Anyway, here are this weeks’ mailbag questions:

The Griffith topic will probably make a bigger cameo in the coming days since we didn’t touch on it much, but specifically pertaining to Leivo, I think familiarity comes into play. Leivo is someone they know inside and out, who knows their trajectory inside and out, and that they have a general idea of where he fits in.

On the other hand, Griffith has only been around a few weeks. He was barely a Leaf to begin with and it’s harder to feel bad about losing something you barely had. Does that make it right? I’m not so sure; I think Griffith is a better player than Leivo, with no disrespect to Josh. But that’s why I imagine they’d pick Leivo first.

He’s played half his minutes with Roman Polak, who was the partner he had the least success with last year as well. I can’t imagine that’s helped his case very much.

I highly doubt it. The idea is to underpromise and overdeliver, not the other way around. Not to mention, tanking when you’ve got literally the best offence in hockey in every single metric other than goals seems like a tough challenge. If they were trying to stifle wins, they would’ve sent Nylander back to the Marlies and Marner back to the Knights and made excuses about neither being ready, and Matthews would, you know, actually be the third line centre.

Even if your defence is crap, you pretty much have to be firing it into your own net to lose a large chunk of games. It’s more likely that they’re making bad defence decisions because they incorrectly think that they’re good decisions, rather than because they’re stealth tanking.

I don’t think any fan that would’ve been won over by his cup was the type of fan that was booing him, so probably not. Those who dislike him probably suddenly feel that he cared more in Pittsburgh which, to them, would be even further proof that he was giving the Leafs the finger; a totally wrong statement, but the likely mental gymnastic used.

My grandfather was a vacuum.