It was only one game.\u00a0 One game in another lost season;\u00a0 one game against a (recently) struggling Eastern Conference opponent and their backup goaltender.<\/p>\n
Still, tonight’s 3-0 Leaf victory finally gave more than a little reason for hope to long-suffering Leaf fans.\u00a0 There was a goaltender in our net who made saves and who seemed confident about it.\u00a0 There was a beast of defenceman, Phaneuf, thumping offensive interlopers.\u00a0 Nikolai Kulemin was driving to the net, taking the puck through the middle of the ice decisively and in such a way as to create some worried moments for opposition defenders.\u00a0 Frederik Sjostrom showed some determination and self-sacrifice on the penalty kill and – for what may be the first time this year, at least for a Maple Leaf defender – forcing an opposition defenseman to abort the plan to shoot and dump off a “second-best” pass instead.\u00a0 There was a power play goal from Francois Beauchemin.<\/p>\n
More generally, for the very first time this year, our team came out ready to play from the opening faceoff.\u00a0 If this trade has changed nothing else but the Leafs’ alarming tendency to tentatively piss away at least the first ten minutes of every game, frequently surrendering the lead and always ceding the momentum, it will have been worth it.<\/p>\n
It was only one game; there are no guarantees that this widespread improvement will last.\u00a0 A lot of the numbers suggest that there are still lots of difficult times ahead for a Maple Leafs time that has little by way of\u00a0 personnel on the forward lines who have proven they can score in the NHL (at least beyond Phil Kessel).\u00a0\u00a0 The goaltender’s performance has been trending downwards for a while, and the defence have struggled to shut the door on a consistent basis.\u00a0 All of these things demand that one keep perspective and remember that you cannot infer the existence of a trend from a small sample size of data.\u00a0 It was only one game.\u00a0 For the first time this year, though, I felt like watching one Leaf game tonight wasn’t enough.<\/p>\n
———<\/p>\n
As an aside, shoutouts to eyebleaf of Sports in the City<\/a> who (fittingly enough) headed off for a lengthy trip to India earlier this evening<\/a>.\u00a0 I say “fittingly enough” because eye has been one of the few consistently positive voices in the Barilkosphere;\u00a0 there is something fitting about eye beginning a lengthy holiday on the very day that hope seemed to walk in the front door of the Air Canada Centre for the first time in a long time.\u00a0 After working so diligently over the last couple of years to ensure that at least some of us can see the bright side of things, eye can finally move on to other adventures.\u00a0 Safe travels, brother, you will be missed in these parts, but we look forward to your return.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was only one game. One game in another lost season; one game against a (recently) struggling Eastern Conference opponent and their backup goaltender.<\/p>\n Still, tonight’s 3-0 Leaf victory finally gave more than a little reason for hope to long-suffering Leaf fans. There was a goaltender in our net who made saves and who seemed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[934,1238,944,935,1157,1235,945,1156],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1253"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1255,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253\/revisions\/1255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}