vc_dunkchamp wrote:My biggest problem with the Leafs is even adding Toskala doesn't make them a contending team so why make that move? It's a move designed to get them to playoffs. That should not be the goal, to simply make the playoffs and hope for the best. This is the way the Leafs operate.
If you look at most of the teams to are elite teams, their top players, and usually they have a few are usually drafted by the team and developed. You have Ottawa with Spezza, Alfredsson, Redden and if you want to include Heatley since they traded Havlat for him. Most of our prospects are guys that are considered second tier style prospects. Where's that guy that's going to come in and be the next star for this organization.
Teams like Detroit may have gotten lucky with Zetterberg and Datsyuk, but they did their homework during the Yzerman era and now don't have to go into full rebuild.
This team has not one single elite level prospect. If you were to go around the league, a lot more teams have better prospects than us, the ones that don't are at the bottom and are in rebuild and we're just muddline along in the middle. Not good enough to be a title team and not bad enough to get the type of prospects we need to move forward.
We're still hanging on hope of Antropov, Ponikarovsky at best is a second liner. We wasted Sundin's career by not surrounding him with the right player's.
We're probably at some point going to get our cap in order, only to overpay for a guy like Smyth who neither puts us over the top, but just simply gets us to the playoffs.
I'm sorry, but after 40 year's of ineptitude and not truly building a championship caliber team at any point in those 40 years, I've given up until I see a true effort from manangement to ice the best team in the NHL, which should be the goal of MLSE every year.
Cry me a river. Boston waited 100 years for thier title.
Look, I can appreciate you want a title, every fan of the Leafs does. I think you are calling hindsight is 20/20 a bit here on how much "time" the Leafs had to get under the cap.
The reason why so many other teams "figured out" the new way to spend money was BECAUSE MOST OF THEM WERE POOR OR BAD TO BEGIN WITH when it started up again! Thus, the cheap buggers held on to their chips and "turned it around quickly". While the seats are still half empty.
There was a reason there was a strike, remember? Sure, the Rangers, who were built like us, struggled for a while and kept their picks (because they sucked too at the right time--and so did Detroit).
The Leafs were just good enough at the time he could have jettisoned contracts back then to go for it. It's easy to blame him now when there weren't as many established goalie prospects at that time as there are now that developed in a short turnover. He needed Belfour for the simple fact of some stability at the most important position. Besides, a lot of 40 year old goalies have done pretty well recently (hint: Hasek).
He did take the hit by making some low cost high reward signings with Lindros and Allison. Injuries and poorer goaltending than anyone could have expected (and no one knew what to expect, remember? Remember when no one believed the league was gonna chnage the away they called penalities? Remember?) . He built a big team like before the lockout. He assumed (which by the way, was a fair assumption given the NHL's modus operandi) that the league would relapse and it would be a tug of war out there again. I mean, it had been thatway for years previous.
So, the next year, he concentrates on more of a Buffalo model by trying to steal a fairly cheap 'tender and spending money where it was needed--on D. Even more ridiculous injuries and even worse goaltending than expected pushed the Leafs on the outs by one point in one of the tightest races down the stretch I have ever seen.
This year, he isn't going the cheap route and took a hit to get as sure a very solid goaltender as was available. Now, it wasn't THAT big a hit as we are talking the 13 pick (who turned out to be Alex Daigle and a guy who doesn't know when he'll play in the league Oh yes, and super star lars eller.).
And, in case you hadn't noticed, teams like Tampa have won the cup recently. It only takes your goalie to get hot and your role players to gut it out to make the finals and get a shot at the big prize. They did have talent, but mainly it was goaltending.
Parity is the name of the game now. Scoring is on the decline. Those "top-level prospects" don't see the light of day unless the pluggers are buying them space.
While some of these franchsies bank only on prospects only to see them fall short more than half the time and then almost lose their shirts (as Ottawa and half the league are desperately trying to avoid, despite their on-ice success) the Leafs are trying for a more moderate model (a la anaheim.) Now, they didn't suck as much as Anaheim did before the lockout, so they didn't have the upper tier picks to make to improve as quickly through trade and talent.
Let's wait until the Leafs actually have a season where their defence and forwards actually play more than a month of games combined before we take the GM's head off, ok? Let's see how a team with a great defensive coach, the best player sweden has ever seen, a very good goalie, some nice "second-tier" (whatever) prospects, and a ton of heart and grit and a free agent forward to play with Mats do in the playoffs. I don't know...I'd cheer for them, and probably bet on them, too.
