{"id":16,"date":"2007-10-03T23:30:08","date_gmt":"2007-10-04T03:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2007\/10\/03\/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-about-someone-that-someone-is-probably-andrew-raycroft\/"},"modified":"2007-10-04T14:15:17","modified_gmt":"2007-10-04T18:15:17","slug":"if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-about-someone-that-someone-is-probably-andrew-raycroft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2007\/10\/03\/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-about-someone-that-someone-is-probably-andrew-raycroft\/","title":{"rendered":"If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say About Someone, That Someone is Probably Andrew Raycroft."},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, first things first.\u00a0 I know, it’s been a while since I posted last.\u00a0 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,\u00a0and\u00a0there’s been a recent\u00a0spate of civil unrest in Myanmar, which unrest has\u00a0evidently been put down by the government in a brutally repressive fashion \u00a0(current events not necessarily<\/em> listed in order of worldwide significance).<\/p>\n

But I haven’t got time to write about any of that right now.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

What’s gnawing at my craw?\u00a0 Andrew freakin’ Raycroft, that’s what.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Andrew Raycroft?\u00a0 What the hell was that goaltending performance tonight supposed to demonstrate?\u00a0\u00a0 Earlier this evening the Leafs played the Senators in their home opener and lost 4-3 in overtime.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At least three of the goals surrendered by Raycroft – including the overtime winner – were of the “soft” variety, being clean whiffs on stoppable shots;\u00a0 not rebounds, deflections or tic-tac-toe passing plays, just shots that\u00a0Raycroft plain missed<\/strong>.\u00a0 These are exactly the types of painfully weak goals that got the Hogtown locals upset last\u00a0season and led his wealthy but perenially foolish employers to express their confidence in his abilities in this way:\u00a0 they ran out and\u00a0hired a guy\u00a0(Vesa Toskala) who has\u00a0essentially 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.\u00a0 This, in case you are new to professional sports, is not exactly the sporting equivalent of\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

For those of you out of range of the constant babbling background noise\u00a0of\u00a0 Toronto sports talk radio (say, what is it like living on Mars, anyway?), Leafs coach Paul Maurice astounded basically everybody\u00a0today 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\u00a0postgame dressing room quoits tournament.\u00a0\u00a0 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\u00a0isn’t up to playing in big games.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that no one within a six-hundred mile radius of Toronto believed that Raycroft was up to the task either.\u00a0 Yet there he was, skating on to the ice.<\/p>\n

Now, in any movie that features sporting competition, a plucky bunch of\u00a0nerds taking on the\u00a0a no-nonsense college dean,\u00a0and\/or a battle of the bands, everyone knows that this situation is\u00a0the cue for the ousted and doubted nobody-love-me-but-my-mama-and-she-could-be-jivin’-too underdog to play\u00a0phenomenally and win the big\u00a0game\/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.\u00a0 So what did “Razor”* do to advance the plot in the Maple Leafs’ 2007-2008 movie?\u00a0 Three, count ’em three\u00a0weak<\/strong> goals, with the winner zipping through his wickets like a wide receiver through the Ticats’ secondary.<\/p>\n

Now this is an excellent way to ruin the season opener for me.\u00a0 The rosy glow of optimism brought on by the yearly appearance of the 48th Highlanders was\u00a0already a distant memory for me when “Razor”* waved at an Antoine Vermette floater like a man watching a bus depart;\u00a0 1-0 Sens.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But wait, it gets worse!\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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”.\u00a0\u00a0 At one point, to be fair to Pierre McGuire, I think he did observe that Raycroft<\/em> obviously felt that one of the goals was weak, looking to the sky in exasperation as the puck bulged the twine behind him.\u00a0\u00a0McGuire then spent some considerable time advising Raycroft not to do this – don’t\u00a0let on that you <\/em>think\u00a0you let in a soft one.\u00a0 \u00a0In the end, Danny Heatley won the game with another weak\u00a0wrister that he didn’t even lean into, fer Chrissakes, and nobody said a damn thing.\u00a0 \u00a0This was truly incredible – it was essentially as if Raycroft’s head was on fire, and the TSN crew would say only observe that\u00a0Raycroft seemed to be doing something different with his hair.<\/p>\n

What’s going on here?\u00a0 The man played like crap.\u00a0 I know it, you know it, the talking heads knew it, and nobody said anything about it.\u00a0 To quote the wisdom of Randy Jackson of American Idol\u00a0<\/em>fame:\u00a0 “Dog, that’s not good;\u00a0 not even close.\u00a0 Just keepin’ it real.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0*”Razor”.\u00a0 Presumably a reference to “sharpness”.\u00a0 Is this one of those jokey nicknames, like “slim” for a fat guy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16"}],"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=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}