TLN Monday Mailbag: October 17th

I think it’s really cool that James van Riemsdyk is offering exchanges to Leafs fans who bought his jersey at the start of the season. That’s all I got for an intro today.

When a player clears waivers, he has 30 days or 10 NHL games to elapse before requiring another placement. This means that any of the cleared players (Froese, Laich, Greening, Campbell, etc) can be brought back up in the next few days/weeks to play games in the event of injury.

It’s probably a mixture of the NCAA being out of reach of most people’s attention spans, the fact that it’s early in the season, the fact that goaltenders are hard to get a read on in college, and, most of all, that Woll is so early in his development.

We’re ultimately not talking about a prospect who the Leafs would yank out of school if he had a strong freshman year. He’s super young and there are three U24 goalies waiting in the wings above him. Woll will be interesting if the Leafs’ goaltending depth chart gets really shallow, or as he approaches his senior year. For now, his 0.914 in his first four games is definitely encouraging, but nothing to fully celebrate yet.

Using our Top 20 ranking from the summer as a baseline, which also included essential-graduates Nikita Zaitsev and Connor Brown, the new Top 5 would look as follows.

Mike Babcock has been relatively quiet about the whole ordeal, which is pretty curious. If I had to guess, evening out the workload would probably play into this: Rielly sees a lot of even strength time, after all. Defensive trust may also play a part as well; Gardiner is a little better at holding the line and at gap control, so if the four forwards fall apart, he’s capable of bailing them out. Not that Rielly isn’t, but he isn’t at the same pedigree in that regard, which probably means more than the extra firepower he’d give to a powerplay unit that already has four forwards.

When I’m hitting up the ACC, I cheat a little. Rather than hit up a pub or a restaurant, I go to Longos at Maple Leaf Square. “A grocery store, really?” you might ask.

But like, on top of being able to get any food you want from the grocery store part, they have a salad bar, they make pizza on-site, they have a Starbucks, a Yogurty’s, a wine bar, an actual bar, and free wifi. There are even some couches and a faux fireplace. On the weekends I think you can get a pint of Steamwhistle and a personal pizza for $10, which is obscenely good.

The staff at Ricoh Coliseum are absolute heroes when it comes to treating the staff, players, and media to anything they need, which includes the best media meals I have ever had at any sports facility, no question. I’d rather eat the media meal at Ricoh than have a homecooked dinner, so I don’t have a pre-game spot for Ricoh specifically.

With that said, I’m a Toronto FC season ticket holder, so sometimes I’ll stop somewhere on the way to BMO Field. If I’m on King and want something to drink, I go to The Foggy Dew or The Wheat Sheaf. If I strictly want food, the Thompson Diner on Bathurst south of King makes the best Macaroni and Cheese I’ve ever eaten. Closer to Liberty Village, I like to go to The LOCAL, though it’s usually busy on TFC game days. It might be a bit better before a Marlies game.