So the Leafs have been saying for days that they were not looking for revenge
against Cam Janssen for his late cheap-shot hit against Tomas Kaberle a couple of
weeks ago. I heard interviews with numerous players, including Kaberle (who
got a concussion on the hit and hasn’t played since), and they
all said the same thing – they’re not thinking about revenge at all, they just
want to worry about winning — the two points are more important than getting back at Cam Janssen. So what
happens? Less than ten minutes into the game, Wade Belak goes after Janssen and
fights him, and then all the players congratulate him after the fight, and
after the game, they talk about what a great thing he did. What happened to
“we’re not thinking about revenge?”

And they wonder why people who don’t
follow hockey all that closely think that hockey players are a bunch of thugs,
and that hockey is a violent game.

Today is the trade deadline in the NHL, so teams have until 3:00 this afternoon to decide whether they are going to make a run at the playoffs, or trade away players that will become free agents at the end of the season, thereby getting something for them, instead of getting zilch later. This, traditionally, is the most frustrating day of the season for Leafs fans. This is the day when the Leafs management decides that they are going to take a run at the playoffs, so they need some kind of veteran help, and they trade away prospects and/or draft picks for someone past his prime. This year, there have been rumours of Gary Roberts returning to Toronto, and I love Roberts as a player, but the Leafs need to realize that they have no chance of winning the Cup this year, so adding someone like Roberts would serve no purpose.

There are also rumours about the Leafs getting Bill Guerin, but to do that, they’d have to give up — guess what? — prospects and draft picks. Once again, if this happens, the Leafs will be trading away their future for a hopeless shot at winning the Cup this year. All that giving up the prospects and picks will do is guarantee that the Leafs will be in the same situation next year, and the year after that, and the year after that…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — the Leafs need to blow up the team and start over. Signing the formerly somewhat-overrated and now vastly overpaid Bryan McCabe was a mistake. I like Kaberle, so I don’t have a big problem with signing him long-term (especially since he’s not getting McCabe-type money), and they just re-signed Darcy Tucker, but for only $3 million a year, so that’s not bad at all. I love Sundin, but I think they need to trade him now, while they can still get something for him, and start stocking up on the aforementioned prospects and draft picks, rather than trading them away.

Heard on the radio this morning — the Leafs would like to trade Pavel Kubina back to Tampa. They don’t want anything back for him; they’d just send him back to Tampa, with a note saying “My bad”. :-)

I’ve only been really following basketball for a year or two, but it seems that Raptors GM Bryan Colangelo is very well respected in the league, and with good reason — in less than a year, he’s turned the Raptors from a laughing stock into a conference-contending team. They’re not likely to win a championship this year, but they could be a serious contender within the next few years. Whenever I hear him being interviewed, he gives an air of not just confidence, but control. He is in complete control of the team, and has a plan for it. When I hear the GM of the Blue Jays, J.P. Ricciardi, talk, he gives me the same impression. The Leafs GM, John Ferguson, however, always gives me the impression that he’s doing whatever he can to just stop the bleeding. He’s not trying to make the team tangibly better, he’s just trying to keep it from getting too much worse. Unless the Leafs turn it around in a big way this season (i.e. make the playoffs and win at least one round), they really need to get rid of Ferguson.

Update: The Leafs made one deal today — trading away 23-year-old prospect Brendan Bell and a draft pick for 35-year-old veteran Yanic Perreault. Same ol’ same ol’. Sigh.

Don Cherry was on the radio this morning, talking about how fighting is
required in hockey, and he was going to convince me, the listener, why this
is true. I’m not a fan of fighting in hockey (or lacrosse), so I waited to be
astonished by his insight. He proceeded to tell stories about how so-and-so star
player (Gretzky et al) were “untouchable” and if anyone “looked sideways” at
them, someone would take them out. He called this “protection”. As I’ve stated
before, I don’t have a problem with sending your resident goon out after
someone if he hits your star player with a cheap shot. But what Cherry
and Kypreos and others who advocate fighting don’t seem to “get” is that Wayne
Gretzky and other star players are not just stars, they’re hockey
players, and part of hockey is getting checked. If you’re a star player
like Crosby or Malkin or Nash and you’re heading towards the offensive zone with the puck, you better expect to get hit. If that’s too much for you and you need this
much “protection” (not from cheap shots but from legal checks), then you have no business being in the NHL. This notion of having “untouchable” players is just silly.

Cherry even told one story he told about someone who bumped his star
player accidentally (and Cherry agreed it was accidental), and got
beaten up anyway. He actually laughed when he said that his goon grabbed
the other player by the hair (no helmets in those days) and slammed his head into
the boards. Yo Don, does the name “Steve Moore” mean anything to you? Cherry’s
entertaining and all, but what an idiot.

Warning: Hockey article ahead. See you later, John.

So Rick DiPietro signed a 15 year $67.5 million contract with the
Islanders the other day. This means he’s getting $4.5 million per year until 2021.
There is even a clause in there that says that if he gets injured (hockey-related
injury) and has to retire, he still gets paid. If he decides to retire for any
other reason, the deal is null and void, but why would he? Great deal for
Rick, but why in hell would the Islanders do this? He’s now on contract until
he’s 40, and very few NHL goalies are still playing, let alone
competitive, at age 40. If he doesn’t pan out as a top level goalie, you’re still
paying him that whole time, since this contract makes him untradeable. No other
team would want to take that contract on — especially if the Islanders want
to trade him because he didn’t pan out.

You could argue that DiPietro might still be a competitive goalie in 10 years
when he’s 35, which may be true, so maybe the Islanders are thinking of it
as a 10-year deal “amortized” over 15 years. If he happens to play the last
5 years as well, then that’s a bonus for them. Looking at it that way, he’s
getting $6.75 million per year for 10 years (paid out over 15). The highest
paid goalie in the league, Nikolai Khabibulin, currently makes $6.75 million per
year (coincidence?). Is DiPietro the same caliber goalie as Khabibulin? No, so
this way of thinking doesn’t make much sense either.

Granted, the $4.5 million a year is not a huge amount by NHL standards,
so if the cap goes down, it shouldn’t affect them too much (it’s not like it’s
A-Rod’s “$250 million over 10 years” albatross), but I think it’s still
a big risk for the Islanders to take on an unproven goalie.

Update: A-Rod’s contract is actually $252 million over 10 years, but hey, what’s another $2 million?

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OK, I don’t get this. The Edmonton Oilers were a game away from winning the Stanley Cup, and suddenly everyone’s jumping ship. OK, maybe Chris Pronger had “personal reasons” for wanting out, but there seem to be a lot of players who are leaving Edmonton. Obviously Pronger was traded to Anaheim, but a bunch of free agents have also left: Ty Conklin, Georges Laraque, Sergei Samsonov, and Jaroslav Spacek have all signed with other teams. Mike Peca is supposedly in talks with the Leafs (though that seems to have stalled), and Radek Dvorak has stated that he has no interest in returning. I’d have figured that after having been that close to winning it all, you’d want to stay with the same team, and try to get just that little bit better next year. Maybe after Pronger asked to be traded, a bunch of the free agents figured there was no chance of that, and so they all jumped ship.

Kind of sucks for Edmonton fans, though they probably still have a better
chance of winning it all next year than the Leafs. The Leafs should sign Peca and
Anson Carter quickly, then sign Eric Lindros to a cheap contract (if he’ll take
one; if he wants more money than last year, let him go), and dump Jason
Allison. They already did the right things in buying out Ed Belfour and Tie Domi
(I like the guy and all, but he’s getting too old, and is too expensive for what
he brings to the table), and they resigned Nik Antropov to a fairly cheap
contract, which is good (well, the cheap part is good). Not a big fan of
Antropov’s — we’ve been waiting years for that guy to turn into the star
player he was touted as, but so far in his career, as Bob McCown would say, he’s
just a guy.

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I was browsing around on Wikipedia this evening before my baseball game, when I came across the entry on Eric Lindros. I’ve never been a big fan of the Big E, mainly because of the way he started his career. He was drafted by the lowly Quebec Nordiques in 1991, and had indicated, even before the draft, that he wouldn’t play for them. It was that arrogance that pissed me off — he’d never played a single NHL game, and already he’s decided that he’s too good to play for Quebec. He demanded to be traded, and he was — to the Philadelphia Flyers. The trade was unbelievable though: Lindros went to Philly, and here’s what went back to Quebec: Peter Forsberg, Ron Hextall, Chris Simon, Mike Ricci, Kerry Huffman, Steve Duchesne, a 1st round draft pick in ’93 (Jocelyn Thibault), a 1st round draft pick in ’94 (traded to Toronto in the Mats Sundin deal), and $15 million in cash. Three years later, the Nordiques moved to Colorado, traded Thibault to Montreal for a goalie by the name of Patrick Roy, and won the Stanley Cup (they won it all again in 2001, and have also won 8 division titles). Lindros went on to lead the Flyers to the Cup finals once in 1997, but they didn’t win it.

I found it quite ironic that Lindros refused to play for Quebec because they sucked so bad, and yet trading him away allowed Quebec to become a very strong team for many years. Lindros plays for the Leafs now (or at least he did last year, but hasn’t yet been resigned for next season), so I’m supposed to like him now, but first impressions stick with me for a long time. Having said that, I wouldn’t mind if the Leafs did resign him, as long as it isn’t for much money – $1.5 million tops.

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Whenever I hear of a big-name baseball player requesting a trade, or a rumour that some star player is being shopped around, I always immediately wonder if the Blue Jays can get him. I think about what position he plays and if the Jays could use some improvement there, can he be used as a DH and would that improve the team, that kind of thing. Sometimes I dismiss it pretty quickly; when the Rangers were shopping Alex Rodriguez and his $120 million dollar salary, I knew very quickly that he wouldn’t end up in Toronto, since the Jays simply couldn’t afford him, though I did think it would have been great it that were possible. Other times, it wouldn’t really improve the team anyway – a couple of years ago, if some big-name first baseman was being shopped, it probably wouldn’t have made much sense for the Jays to look at it, since we already had Carlos Delgado at first, and giving up a ton for a part-time first baseman and DH would have been too much. But in any case, the thought always came up.

So it would seem logical that I’d do the same thing with the Maple Leafs, but for some reason, I don’t. When it was announced the other day that Chris Pronger wanted to be traded from the Oilers for “personal reasons”, it didn’t even occur to me that the Leafs might be interested. I did not think “Wow, wouldn’t it be great if he ended up with the Leafs?”, even as a passing fantasy. I thought it interesting — I can’t imagine why he’d want to be traded off of a team that he led to within one game of the Cup, but maybe there are people on the team (or in coaching or management positions) that he just cannot work with, or something like that. Anyway, it was rumoured this morning that the Leafs are offering Tomas Kaberle and Matt Stajan to Edmonton for Pronger, and that Edmonton wants Alex Steen instead of Stajan. The possibility of Pronger in a Leaf uniform came as a total shock to me, and I don’t really know why. Is it because the Leafs GMs have a history of going after aging veterans past their prime, rather than trying to get a superstar player in his prime? When was the last time the best player in the league played for the Leafs? An awful long time ago, I assure you. Now, given the fact that the best player in the league has been named Gretzky, Lemieux, or Jagr for the vast majority of the last 25 years, that doesn’t mean much, but still.

But more central to the Pronger thing, when was the last time the Leafs acquired someone who was, at the time he was acquired, one of the best in the league? You could argue for Mats Sundin in 1994. Other than that… well let just say it was before the Ballard years, and Ballard gained control of the team in 1971, according to Wikipedia.

In other Leafs news, they traded for Andrew Raycroft the other day. I have to say, I’ll be more confident with him in net than with the 40+ oft-injured Ed Belfour. With Raycroft as the starting goalie and J.S. Aubin as his backup, the Leafs should buy Belfour out (as I’ve said before), and either trade (good luck) or release Mikael Tellqvist.

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