Toronto Maple Leafs Deserve More Hype and Optimism
By James Tanner
The Toronto Maple Leafs lost 5-4 Wednesday night to the Chicago Blackhawks.
The score was not indicative of how the Toronto Maple Leafs played, however. They were down 5-0 half-way through the game, and they were able to claw their way back and give their fans an exciting finish, but they were still down 5-0 in the first place.
It was a brutal game.
Their second in a row.
But there is nothing to worry about.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are Fine
The Leafs might have just played two of their worst games of the season this week, and pessimism about the team was high even before that.
It shouldn’t have been, and it makes no sense, but it was.
They don’t start on time.
They rely too much on their goalie.
They can’t beat Boston.
They can’t beat Tampa.
They might as well just go to bed and cry, forget about hockey and dissolve the team.
That is the main gist I get from fans in real life, on Twitter, from analysts on TV and the Radio, and from this site’s comments section.
I don’t understand it, or agree with it, but there you go.
The fact is, yeah, the Leafs played two bad games. But hardly anyone even bothers to point out that in the 20 games preceding these two bad performances, the Leafs were 13-4-3 which is 29 points out of a possible 40, and a quarter season performance that would make them the tenth best team of all time.
It’s a performance that, extrapolated over 82 games, would see them win the President’s trophy. During those 20 games, they missed Kadri for eight games, while also missing Gardiner and Dermott for several games each.
So why do Leafs fans only look at the negative? My theory is that because they haven’t gone on a big winning steak that becomes the talk of the league, they’ve sort of flown under the radar.
The Leafs biggest winning streak is five games. Add in one pretty crappy month of January (only three weeks long due to a bi-week) and 50 years of losing, and the Leafs actual play isn’t getting the level of respect it deserves.
The Leafs, despite dropping two in a row, sit in fifth place overall. That’s really, really good. Also, their roster is stacked and in their recent loses, they’ve been forced to ice Marincin, Zaitsev, Hainsey and Ozhiganov for almost 70 minutes per game. No team can hope to maintain their great play when forced into that situation.
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So don’t let the last two games get you down. At full strength, the Leafs are capable of being the best team in hockey. It’s time people started acting like it.