With a second buyout window set to open on Monday for the Maple Leafs, Milan Michalek was in town house hunting and training with a few Marlies. That and more in your Sunday links.
Maple Leafs’ Michalek can help ‘show young guys the way’ (Sportsnet)
“I think that’s why they brought me here—to show the young guys the way,” Michalek told Sportsnet this week. In town for a couple days to house-hunt downtown, he was still catching his breath after a lengthy on-ice workout at the MasterCard Centre with crossover whisperer Barb Underhill and a couple of Marlies.
Almost Daring to Dream (Sportsnet)
In the span of a year, Canada’s largest city claimed a new lease on sporting life. But can it really shake its loser label without a title? In 2011, in the same month this magazine was born, Canada’s largest metropolis was ranked by ESPN as the worst sports city in all of North America. Yes, worse than Cleveland, which at the time was working on year 47 of not winning anything at all. A year later, in a similar survey, Toronto’s Maple Leafs were ranked 122nd out of 122 North American sports teams, and it was a feat they repeated twice more in the summers of 2014 and 2015. Breaking up those years of basement-dwelling, of course, was the club’s lone playoff appearance in a dozen years. And how did that end? Well, the Leafs were up 4–1 with 12 minutes to play…
The Leafs’ old dogs and how to use them (PPP)
Michalek is a pretty simple one. You want him to score goals, and you put him somewhere he can do that. Give him powerplay time, give him a centre who can feed him, and sell him as offensive depth at the TDL. Guys who produce in the 15-20 goal range are always saleable at the deadline; look at Lee Stempniak. If Michalek is simply done, and maybe he is, there’s no helping it. Scoring wingers who can’t score don’t fetch much. Michalek did occasionally take a PK shift in the past, but unlike Laich, he wasn’t really a first choice in that role.
Low-key Stanley Cup party Kessel’s way of saying thanks (Globe and Mail)
What the Pittsburgh Penguins star’s celebration didn’t have was many fellow players. No current members of the Toronto Maple Leafs were present, and former captain Dion Phaneuf – who flew in for the celebration from his off-season home in Prince Edward Island – was the only former teammate. A rowdy P.K. Subban, meanwhile, showed up hooting and hollering at around midnight, still wearing a cowboy hat from his introductory press conference in Nashville that afternoon. But that was it, in terms of NHL star power.
Anders Lindback to Toronto Maple Leafs? (Digital Journal)
Anthony Fusco has reported that Toronto could go in a different direction by adding 26-year-old Anders Lindback. The 6’6″ net minder has played for five different NHL clubs in his six years in the league. Last season with Arizona, the former seventh round draft pick played 16 games for the Coyotes, compiling a 5-7-1 record and a 3.11 goals against average, not exactly stellar numbers, but he is just two years removed from a solid 2.76 average playing for a poor Buffalo Sabres team.
