TLN Monday Mailbag: October 2nd

It’s mailbag time! What a wonderful thing to get to do right before the season starts and right after the Leafs just cut half their roster on their way down to the 23 man opening night lineup which needs to be set by tomorrow night. I might be alone on this but I’m awfully excited the preseason is over and done with and we can begin the needlessly long regular season that seems exciting right now, but will begin feeling tedious sometime around the beginning of February. Thank goodness for the trade deadline, right?

Anyway, we’ve got a few questions, so it’s time to dive in.

I was certainly hoping to get asked something along these lines because I feel I have a thoughtful answer to this. The short answer is Zach Hyman, so if that’s all you want you can probably move on down the post. The more thoughtful explanation of that is that Hyman is going to be playing with Matthews and Nylander and has a regular spot in the lineup. Leivo is by far the more offensively gifted player, but if he’s rarely making it into the lineup and when he does it may be with Matt Martin and Dominic Moore for 4 minutes a night, he’s not going to put up great numbers.

As for Hyman, I don’t buy into the fact that he was having bad luck last year when it came to his shooting percentage. I really like Hyman, but scoring isn’t part of his game. The percentage has no place to go but up, but managing an 11% shooting percentage in the AHL doesn’t make that his norm either. Ideally, Hyman shoots a lot less or continues to throw low pucks at the net in hopes of a Matthews rebound. The fact that Hyman as well will go to the net means that he’ll be shoveling a lot of junk courtesy of rebounds, and with that I’d say he has the potential to be a 15 goal scorer. That might be a bit high since he’s likely not going to see any power play time, but if you look at some of the numbers that Tomas Holmstrom and Dan Cleary were able to put up being used as puck retrieval specialists on top lines for Detroit, that’s probably what’s in the cards for Hyman.

The way Leivo passes him in goal totals would be through the very real possibility of a trade. Even then I don’t think Leivo is someone who gets to double digits easily.

With Malcolm Subban on waivers there is a former first round pick with a well known family name available to address the question of who should be the Leafs backup goaltender this year. Given the fact that the current two options are Curtis McElhinney and Garret Sparks, it seems reasonable to consider someone who makes it so Toronto won’t be relying on Freddy Andersen for 70 starts this season.

By the numbers, Sparks is the better goaltender than Subban, but he’s a year older and wasn’t drafted in the first round. Both goaltenders are 6’2, and seem to meet the height requirements for what the Leafs want in a netminder, but again, I’d still give Sparks the advantage since he’s been developing in the Leafs system, knows what they want him to do.

How McElhinney fits into this is he’s going to be the guy who sits on the end of the bench while Sparks gets some work with the Marlies. If Sparks is showing promise he’ll come up and cutting McElhinney loose should be an easy decision at that point. Bringing in Subban either means that you are going with a complete wildcard as your backup which I can’t imagine a team would want to do. There is the possibility they acquire him and try to send him down on waivers themselves, but that seems like a longshot that Boston wouldn’t just grab him back.

Anyway, to date there isn’t much to show that Malcolm Subban is going to be an exceptional NHL goaltender or even that he’s ready for a job in the NHL. If a team is really interested in him, they might be better off to let Subban clear waivers in Boston and try to make a trade for him.

Such a handsome question. After giving this a lot of thought I’ve landed on has to be considered the best answer and that is John Slaney. My reasoning for this is how invested I was in his career. As a hockey card collector in the 90s, I was blessed with numerous John Slaney rookie cards and had dreams of one day retiring when I flipped them all because Slaney had become the next Bobby Orr. It didn’t exactly turn out as I hoped, but Slaney carries an advantage over the other two players I’d consider and he that is he is unlike Michael Ryder or Dan Cleary, he never played on the Habs, Bruins, or Red Wings. That makes him aces to me.

This is a very important question and seems like it deserves an entire post unto itself. That being said I will attempt to answer it here.

Unfortunately I had to disqualify my initial answer of Vincent LoVerde because no one has ever considered LoVerde a prospect. As much as I believe LoVerde sounds like a recalled frozen pasta dinner, I can’t go with that answer.

Instead I’m going with Yegor Korshkov because his name reminds me of Khlav Kalash.

Finally…

Medical science says that you require a minimum of seven hours of sleep a night, but frankly that’s just time that you should be spending on the Buds. The best number of times you should Buds is once, but it should last all day.