you’ve convinced me, now the leafs would just need to convince another gm in that scenario. it will be interesting to see what happens next season. if i’m matthews, i’m low-key looking at my options and getting my affairs in order for a move to another team or country. getting assassinated by gudas and watching my teammates lollygag around like eunuchs and doing nothing. gudas could have whipped out his junk and pissed on matthews and nobody in a blue jersey would do anything about it. shit, i wanted to see somebody come off the bench and at least try if the pantywaists on the ice wouldn’t. fuck, i’d half expect berube to see red, flash back to his enforcer days, and go after gudas in the tunnel later or something.
if matthews stays and i was him, i get up in front of the whole team in the locker room and lay down the new law. maybe even get adversarial a little, get in some faces, poke some chests, call out some shit into the open and confront it. if he wouldn’t do that, then i’m not sure if i’d want him. and if he did and it didn’t make a difference starting with the next game, my next call would be to my agent and the GM.
I know exactly how you feel and I wish the Leafs were built differently too. They just have a team full of listless pussies with very, very few exceptions. You can have a few, high skill pussies but not the majority of the team and that’s a major issue the Leafs have had the past two decades.
The good part about rebuilding with new management, if you had a guy like Pronger as part of it, you wouldn’t see that shit ever again. You could draft accordingly to assemble a group of mean, tough, determined, motivated bastards so that when you do have a couple soft pussies who only score goals, they’re insulated and protected like Pasta in Boston for example.
Matthews is absolutely the opposite of that. He’s not going to demand that from his own team. You can tell he’s a marshmallow. He’s a bigger, better Kessel.