Okay, first things first. I know, it’s been a while since I posted last. Lots has happened – Casey Printers has come to Hamilton, there were earthquakes and fires in Greece, there’s an election campaign (and referendum) in Ontario, and there’s been a recent spate of civil unrest in Myanmar, which unrest has evidently been put down by the government in a brutally repressive fashion (current events not necessarily listed in order of worldwide significance).
But I haven’t got time to write about any of that right now. Spouse is waiting for me to take out the garbage – at least she will be when she gets off the telephone – so I have to move quickly to speak my peace.
What’s gnawing at my craw? Andrew freakin’ Raycroft, that’s what. I know that there has already been a bit of information posted on this site that could be construed as negative commentary on the career progress of one Jason Maas, and I’ll probably get a few nasty emails about that (if Jason’s Mom ever reads this site, that is). I certainly don’t want to come off like I’m trying to make it common practice to basically pee on the shoes of whatever local professional sports personality I happen to have noticed on any given day, but there are some things up with which I will not put.
Andrew Raycroft? What the hell was that goaltending performance tonight supposed to demonstrate? Earlier this evening the Leafs played the Senators in their home opener and lost 4-3 in overtime. At least three of the goals surrendered by Raycroft – including the overtime winner – were of the “soft” variety, being clean whiffs on stoppable shots; not rebounds, deflections or tic-tac-toe passing plays, just shots that Raycroft plain missed. These are exactly the types of painfully weak goals that got the Hogtown locals upset last season and led his wealthy but perenially foolish employers to express their confidence in his abilities in this way: they ran out and hired a guy (Vesa Toskala) who has essentially no experience in the starting job (and promptly overpaid the said novitiate), with the full intention of kicking Raycroft to the curb two times quick. This, in case you are new to professional sports, is not exactly the sporting equivalent of a “very well done, we want to move you from french fry jockey to the show – yes, the drive through window” on your year-end performance report, Andrew.
For those of you out of range of the constant babbling background noise of Toronto sports talk radio (say, what is it like living on Mars, anyway?), Leafs coach Paul Maurice astounded basically everybody today by deciding to start Raycroft in goal in the home opener against the Senators, preferring (apparently) to keep Vesa Toskala fresh for reasons I can only surmise must involve a postgame dressing room quoits tournament. There is no other logical explanation for this move – the panel of talking heads on TSN expressed it perfectly when they pointed out the obvious – that this introduces the element of doubt into the Leafs’ goaltending situation, basically signalling that management feels as though they have made a colossal mistake in signing Toskala and now feel that their number one guy isn’t up to playing in big games.
The bottom line is that no one within a six-hundred mile radius of Toronto believed that Raycroft was up to the task either. Yet there he was, skating on to the ice.
Now, in any movie that features sporting competition, a plucky bunch of nerds taking on the a no-nonsense college dean, and/or a battle of the bands, everyone knows that this situation is the cue for the ousted and doubted nobody-love-me-but-my-mama-and-she-could-be-jivin’-too underdog to play phenomenally and win the big game/totally pull a wickedly complicated techno-prank that gives that snotty dean what’s coming to him/embarrass Steve Vai with a mindbending guitar solo. So what did “Razor”* do to advance the plot in the Maple Leafs’ 2007-2008 movie? Three, count ’em three weak goals, with the winner zipping through his wickets like a wide receiver through the Ticats’ secondary.
Now this is an excellent way to ruin the season opener for me. The rosy glow of optimism brought on by the yearly appearance of the 48th Highlanders was already a distant memory for me when “Razor”* waved at an Antoine Vermette floater like a man watching a bus depart; 1-0 Sens. I had arrived at full-fledged frustration when “Razor”* put a bookend on that one by similarly flapping at an unobstructed Daniel Alfredsson moderate wrister from the top of the circle. But wait, it gets worse! Somehow, none of the gums hired by TSN to flap concerning the subject of hockey were set in motion to make so much as a passing observation on the inferior nature of Raycroft’s play during the ensuing intermission. Granted, during the second intermission, the panel canvassed the quality of Raycroft’s work – and essentially decided that he was doing well, choosing to rely on the “well, if the Leafs are winning, how bad can he be playing?” theory rather than say, “reasoned and logical objective analysis”. At one point, to be fair to Pierre McGuire, I think he did observe that Raycroft obviously felt that one of the goals was weak, looking to the sky in exasperation as the puck bulged the twine behind him. McGuire then spent some considerable time advising Raycroft not to do this – don’t let on that you think you let in a soft one. In the end, Danny Heatley won the game with another weak wrister that he didn’t even lean into, fer Chrissakes, and nobody said a damn thing. This was truly incredible – it was essentially as if Raycroft’s head was on fire, and the TSN crew would say only observe that Raycroft seemed to be doing something different with his hair.
What’s going on here? The man played like crap. I know it, you know it, the talking heads knew it, and nobody said anything about it. To quote the wisdom of Randy Jackson of American Idol fame: “Dog, that’s not good; not even close. Just keepin’ it real.”
*”Razor”. Presumably a reference to “sharpness”. Is this one of those jokey nicknames, like “slim” for a fat guy?