Advertisement

Offseason!Continuing on from yesterday’s mashup, everything is decidedly quiet in Leafland. Quiet, and kinda sad. At least, it’s been sad since I read Dangle’s piece @ TLN yesterday and reached, specifically, this sentence: “I cannot remember interest in the Toronto Maple Leafs ever being lower than it is now.” Definitive case of the “sad because it’s trues”?

I think the toughest part of this offseason for Leaf fans is knowing that, despite last year’s disastrous finish, the organizational rebuild is still moving in a positive direction – and it’s just taking an agonizingly long time. The Leafs‘ best asset right now is the passage of time as some of the team’s young assets mature into the complete and, hopefully, high impact players than some of them may very well turn out to be.

But that’s not enough for a fan base that demands some sort of justice. Some sort of accountability for a lost and colossally disappointing season. Some sort of retribution, beyond the firing of a coach many of them wanted gone before the February slide even started.

We know the Maple Leafs cannot go into next season with the roster the way it is. I think we can safely assume another deal is coming. However terrible the hockey implications of standing pat might be, the PR disaster would dwarf it.

The Rick Nash trade was supposed to open the flood gates. It did not. The Weber offer sheet was kinda, sorta, supposed to do the same. But here we are, on August 2nd, clamouring for something to happen besides the seemingly-cordial-but-probably-not-actually-cordial CBA negotiations. At some point the moves will start to come, but until they do, all we have is the hope that this miserable patience ends up being worthwhile.

And jokes. We have jokes. Not any that I’m going to write outside of that image above, but here’s a bunch that turned up on some page when I Googled “Toronto Maple Leaf jokes”.

Thursday morning links!

There’s only one NHL Captain who’s as good at cheating death as Kirk, and it seems he’s going to try it one more time. Hey, remember that part of the story where our own former Swedish Captain is only a year older and had something like 78 points in his second-to-last season not all that long ago? Look, just put Mats between Joffrey and Phil. Seriously, I don’t even care anymore.

-At TLN, Scott Reynolds takes a look at the forwards selected in the 2010 NHL Entry draft. Or, as we might call it, “the draft Toronto Maple Leaf fans were trying to pretend didn’t happen, which is easy, because for them it didn’t.”

-Pension Plan Puppets’ Top 25 under 25 series continues, with Spencer Abbot. What? Funny comment? Nope, pretty straightforward.

-Danny Gray chastizes Leaf fans for expecting too much in the way of blockbuster deals and marginalizing the Schenn/JVR swap. He’s not wrong.

-The Philadelphia Flyers have awarded head coach Peter Laviolette with a fairly straightforward two-year contract extension. Which is kind of disappointing. If only because, by now, I’d expect wildcard Holmgren to have announced he’s built some sort of cyborg coach out of parts of deceased Hall of Fame coaches from eras past, and traded seven first round picks for the dilithium-based energy source used to power it. Wow, that’s two Star Trek references in one Mashup. I’m done. We’re getting into serious @YakovMironov territory now.

-Rick DiPietro is alive, and a hockey player again?

-Not remotely Leaf-related but if we’re so desperate for news that we’re making multiple movie references, I should admit I’m a colossal geek for 007 films and the trailer for the new one, Skyfall, is just outright classic-looking and awesome.

-Matt Mistele
twitter.com/TOTruculent