Photo Credit: Avry Lewis-McDougall / @Avry

It’s August 1st, and outside of us looking at salary data and calling it a borderline captastrophe (I’ll see myself out), there isn’t exactly really a lot to talk about today. I wouldn’t blame you if, instead of surfing the internet, you went outside and explored the world, or at least played Pokemon or something.

Friend of the blog Avry Lewis-McDougall did just that, cruising by the Air Canada Centre and noticed something… what the hell happened to Mats Sundin?

Photo Credit: Avry Lewis-McDougall

As you can see, the bottom half of Sundin’s stick is clearly gone. As my brother John Veillette (who works in security and is a self-proclaimed expert in both his trade and in broken things) points out, if this was an act of vandalization, it would’ve been through blunt force rather than with, say, a saw, based on the way the tear appears. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that someone would have the time to break apart a Legend’s Row statue. More likely, this was either a case of weather damage finding an Achilles heel in the structure, or the team themselves is looking to fix something they felt to be wrong with the stick half and rather than pulling the entire thing out, have separated it from the statue to repair.

Hopefully, it’s a case of repair, rather than vandalism. After all, while any public structure deserves to have respect given to it, a statue of arguably the greatest Leaf of all time standing next to statues of other great Leafs deserves it more than anything else. You just don’t mess with Mats, man.

How Mats is supposed to look, from Ash2276 / Flickr