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So whenever I play Puckdoku, I always try to use guys who played for the Maple Leafs.
Today, I was absolutely killing it. 8/8, 7 of them Maple Leafs, with a 9.2 uniqueness score.
And then I blew it. All I had to do was fill in 10+ playoff games played career, 250+ assists career.
Sticking with my desire for Leafs, I filled in Wendel.
234 career regular season assists.
Damn.
~WedgieTried your rules. Managed to get a 2 uniqueness but I took 2 relatively educated guesses that could’ve gone either way.
Captain – 250+ Assists – <5 Playoff Goals
10+GP: Vaive – Williams – Benoit
Defenseman: Ramage – Ellet – McGill
Cup Winner: Armstrong – McDonald – LefebvreI sort of assumed – but had no idea – how many career assists Tiger had but it seemed he played long enough and well enough to get there. He had 272.
I also felt that Lefebvre never scored and I knew he won a cup with Colorado after the Clark trade – that was close. He actually had 4 playoff goals.Let me counter:
The Panthers led the league in penalties this year – 10:24 per game.
The Leafs were 18th in the league – 7:58 per game.
So doing very simple math here, the Panthers should be getting one and a quarter more penalties called on them a game than the Leafs.
It’s even worse in the playoffs: Panthers averaging 13:08 per game, Leafs 8:30 per game.
So we’re playing virtually the same as the regular season, and they’ve become a little dirtier (and that’s assuming the reffing is the same – which we all know is not true).
~Wedgie
I shall counter your counter by simply saying that I sincerely do believe that the Gregory Campbell theory is more than just a theory.
I’m a little nervous about this evening game
~dmnted
My gut going into this one is that the way the officiating went for the second half of the last game is what we’re going to see tonight. I don’t think the Leafs should expect a powerplay. Power Play opportunities so far have been 5-3 and 3-2 in Toronto’s favour over two games and the Leafs have a 2-0 series lead. I sincerely can’t imagine a world where the NHL doesn’t give Florida a huge man advantage bonus tonight to get them back in the series – look at some of the egregious infractions solely against Holmberg last game that went uncalled.
I think if the Leafs can overcome that and win, it would be monumental.
So, yeah, I am also a little nervous about this game!
I’ll address both of you in a single post.
1. Funny how Tree keeps getting praise for filling out the roster but he didn’t need to trade one of the ‘core 4’ as both of you claimed he would HAVE to do to fix the defense. Funny how a Dubas trade and a free agent signing by Tree really helped solidify arguably the leagues best shut down pair.
2. What do you mean Tree did all the work? Tree didn’t draft a single player on the team and the youngest two guys contributing consistently are Knies (on the top line) and Woll who was excellent during the season and Stoly was only really anointed the starting goalie in the last couple weeks. Let’s not act like Tree made some brilliant move here.
3. Fairly certain Nylander was traded by Fifty like a 100 times in the past couple off seasons as “the core 4 would never work!” or so I was told. Also Marner but both Dubas and Tree have stuck to the “core 4” and are seeing results.
4. We all agree on Keefe though. He needs some more seasoning in the NHL as a coach if he wants to see real success.
5. Dubas doesn’t go without his warts but let’s not act like he didn’t do anything to the current line up. If it was upto you two the core 4 wouldn’t be here and neither would Carlo or Laughton because if I recall it was said “don’t trade any firsts until they prove they deserve it” or was it “JT takes up too much cap this year to do anything ‘major’ so just run out the season and REALLY go for it next year.”
6. Leafs still have to get past the Panthers but they’ve shown they are certainly different and a large part of that is on Berube and his D core. OEL/Carlo/Tanev are all excellent grabs by Tree.
~AaronOne of the things I will give Dubas credit for was that was evolving certain attitudes as he went – his TDL acquisitions of guys like O’Reilly, Schenn, Lyubushkin, Acciari – even Foligno – showed that he was realizing that he needed his team to be tougher. The criticism he has to receive is that he not only failed to build these teams in the offseason where his team could grow into a style together but he also never addressed real stability in the net.
“Defense wins championships,” isn’t just a slogan. Occasionally a team with superior firepower overwhelms the opposition and defense be damned, but for the most part you have a team that just has a strong defensive approach supported by strong defensive players and they can often go far with some offensive punch thrown in.
I wasn’t really a fan of the Treliving hire – he seemed to have a fair bit of up and down in Calgary and it was hard to get a read on him – but if you look at the changes made under him, I see the following:
– Replace Keefe with Berube
– Not resign Bunting, Kerfoot, Giordano, Brodie, Aston-Reese, Lafferty, O’Reilly, Acciari, Gustafsson, Simmonds, Edmundson, Bertuzzi, Klingberg, Samsonov and Jones
– Sign Lorentz, Ekman-Larsson, Pacioretty and Stolarz
– Trade away Liljegren, Timmins, Dewar and Lafferty
– Acquire Tanev, Carlo, LaughtonHis missteps, in my opinion were signing Klingberg and probably Reaves; given that Reaves is a $200k cap hit, I’m not sure that’s a major misstep.
So as much as I certainly will say that I misjudged him from his work in Calgary, I don’t think there’s much to complain about.
iv rewatched that embellishment penalty about 50 times now..with benefit of slowmo…I see how he did make it look worse..100% over did it to get a call.
so im good with it.. carry on
~sensReally? I haven’t really watched with any great scrutiny – but I heard people say Rodrigues peeked and saw him coming, but I never saw that in the few replays I had seen. I think any team and fanbase has the objective right to feel a tad bent over by that call. In that instance he deserved the boarding call and it was borderline to a 5 minute. The fact that Florida didn’t get the man advantage there is probably what spiralled the game because the refs just decided to let them get away with attempted murder on Holmberg 2-3 times after that.
Honestly looking at that draft, I think in a redraft, Knies goes in the top 3 easily.
~fakepartofme
I was thinking that initially as well, but it’s a decent crop of guys in the mix – like Johnston, Hughes, Guenther, Johnson, Eklund, Stankoven, Clarke, Power, Moser . . .but yeah, maybe. I sort of lump Knies in with Guenther in terms of my expectations, and I’d probably have said Johnston, Hughes, Guenther were at the top, where Knies/Guenther is a pick’em? Especially if Knies keep progressing the way he has been.
Two huge factors this year are Knies and Pacioretty. They are both big strong bodies going to the net, creating room, causing havoc, taking the body, and generally drawing attention to the net front which is actually creating some space for our skill players. We’ve never had it at this level before. We no longer look like a total perimeter team.
Secondly, we had a 6-3 advantage last night in rush chances. The long pass has worked as an option. The Florida d, while very big, is not the most mobile or effective puck moving group. I actually don’t think it’s as good as last year. I’d take Montour over Seth Jones, and OEL is a better puck mover than what’s on their bottom pair.
~ fifty mission capKnies coming into his own has been a revelation. He’s carrying a lot of the work for that top line while Matthews struggles. I couldn’t agree more about Pacioretty coming in and providing that moxy/grit that is letting Nylander move around. Again . . . you get a big body who wins battles on your line and your skill guys can work off of that. Hyman used to provide it and he wasn’t as skilled nor as big as Knies – but he was good and he brought the effort. You add in Laughton and Lorentz on that 4th line and there’s a lot of good things happening through the lineup. I’d like to see a bit more jam from McMann’s board game because the Domi line needs that.
The only thing I’d say is that probably our worst goals against this playoff have happened while OEL and Benoit run around in their own zone and get lost on net front coverage. There’s always that downside that comes with an affordable but good skating puck mover.
I had to do some googling to jog my memory.
Aaaaah, back when we were in the Norris Divison, and the Norris Division was putrid.
We finished with 70 points that year – tied with the Minnesota North Stars for last place in the division, but we had more wins.
We faced the St. Louis Blues in the first round. They won the division with 79 points!
Wregget was our starter. I had forgotten that Salming was still on the team (holy poop – from 1973-74 to 1988-89!). It was Vaive’s last year on the team.
I was looking at the standings and wondering why teams have such low point totals – until I remembered there were no loser points.
Edmonton won the President’s Trophy that year with 106 points. The only other team to hit 100 was the Flyers.
~ WedgieSo we were talking about it and I was using Hockey-Reference just to click through the years – knowing that we’ve made the 2nd round a tad infrequently since Y2K – and I was positive it couldn’t have been in the 80s because we were so terrible. But . . . there it was.
I mean they made the 2nd round of the playoffs and drafted 7th (Luke Richardson, for inquiring minds). The year before that 70 point season they had 57 (25-48-7 !) points – and made the playoffs and even won the first round, 3-0, in the last of the NHL’s best-of-5 opening rounds.
From the Athletic:
“…this is the first time the Leafs are up 2-0 in a series that isn’t in the first round since 1987!”
~ Atomic WedgieI’ve mentioned that I’ve been watching the playoffs with a few friends, but one is an Oilers fan and the other is a Jets fan – the last time all three of our teams were in the 2nd round together? Also 1987. I was 17, the Jets fan was 20 and the Oilers fan was 10.
I am obviously a Dubas “fan” because his fingerprints are still on this team. He just fell into the trap of a newer GM/every GM issue which is he fell in love with some of his owns players and he wasn’t willing to make the moves until it was too late. I mean he was the one who drafted Knies and Woll, traded for McCabe, I think he brought in Jarnkork but that could have been Tree. He also vehemently stuck to the core 4, especially Styles. Tree deserves a lot of credit here though too, tanev and Carlo are excellent moves and he as well stuck to the core 4.
I think Berube has done excellent and the issue for both Dubas and Tree were believing in Keefe longer than they should have however Tree likely made the pro GM move of keeping him around as an easy “pass” last year.
~ AaronI don’t know. And I mean that literally – not as a passive comment. I just don’t. Keefe’s system was excellent for puck possession but terrible for the risk management associated. Berube’s system is far less risky but also more boring in some ways – and yet in the playoffs Berube’s system scores more, allows less and still looks questionable all too often!
Dubas definitely influenced this lineup, but Rielly was a Burke pick, Nylander was a Nonis pick, Marner and Matthews were Lamiorello picks.
Dubas did bring in, or draft, Holmberg, Robertson, Knies, McMann, Jarnkrok, Kampf, Domi, McCabe, Benoit and Woll.
Treliving in one year has brought in Stolarz, Pacioretty, Carlo, OEL, Tanev, Lorentz and Laughton.
Berube has brought in a bit more of a “get it done” attitude, I think.
Well, hurry up and wash that bad boy, you gotta wear it to work again Friday!
No! Never wash it if you’re on a winning streak! You wear the victory dirt.
This is the way.
I can barely think from the blood loss to my brain. This has been unexpected and exceptional.
I feel like somehow uh . . .Dubas and Keefe . . .like . . .maybe weren’t good?
Keep up the good work, Leafs. Very impressive.
