MacK_Attack

LA and 28 other teams.

I guess the Pocket Rocket chooses not to remember all of the stick-swinging incidents his brother got into. Rocket Richard was known to snap and carve up faces on a regular basis.

According to The Hockey News, the NHL is preparing for a work stoppage with its referees by contacting minor pro leagues in hopes of recruiting replacement officials.

My only theory that could justify the signing was that they thought Kaberle was gone and they felt they needed a guy for the powerplay and couldn't wait to see if Kaberle was going to be dealt or not.

They haven't, but he's only played two games. He was a healthy scratch last night. Though Carl Gunnarsson played pretty well, so I doubt he'll get back in soon.

It's a tough blueline to crack. Not a lot of ice time to be scooped up by Lebda, or anybody else outside of the top-four. The only defenceman making less than him is Gunnarsson, and that's because he's on an ELC. $1.45 million really isn't an exorbitant amount anymore. It's 2% of the cap. Hell, they're paying Jeff Finger $3.5 million to play in the AHL. I'll say that keeping Kaberle has made Lebda awfully redundant in the sense that they don't need him on the PP with Kaberle running things. Now next year could be a different story.

Kaberle does it every game. In any event, Ledbda expected to sit tonight, Carl Gunnarsson back in.

Feb. 17th. Thrashers @ Coyotes

They could - but they won't. Seems to me Bettman will delay a move to Canada for as long as he can. Right now, all he's got to keep a team out of Quebec City is the arena issue.

6 games.

Agreed. The Braves playoff games both had lots of empty seats in the upper deck.

Didn't Columbus have 9,000 and a change last night?

Komisarek is playing on the 3rd pairing. Dion Phaneuf - Francois Beauchemin Tomas Kaberle - Luke Schenn Brett Lebda - Mike Komisarek Carl Gunnarsson

I think the issue most people took with the Rios/Guillen comments was that they suggested (or at least implied) that the team should move. I don't think anybody denies that hockey takes priority over every other sport. Besides, it's not up to the media to advertise pro sports teams. They (we) cover based on priority in the market. Based on what the people and the advertisers want to hear and read about.

There's a very, very simple explanation for that. It sells. If the Leafs are not mentioned in the first two minutes of a hockey TV or radio show, ratings drop. They either have to talk about the Leafs off the top or tease a Leafs story to come. They have to talk about the Leafs because advertisers demand it. If they are on the front page of a paper, sales are better. Advertisers usually want at least some mention of the Leafs on the front page. Same can be said for magazines. If you look at a newsstand (in most of Ontario) at the start of the season, most of the season preview magazines will have a picture of a Leaf on the cover. Simple reason, it will sell more copies. Same reason why the Leafs still remain the team on national Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts. They mean higher ratings and better ad revenue. Any Canadian team other than the Canadiens are a ratings killer. The Habs as the national broadcast cause a smaller ratings drop compared to the Leafs, but still significant enough for advertisers to require the Leafs as the national broadcast nearly every Saturday.

Precisely why they wouldn't agree to it. Ties are never coming back, they're just bad news. Teams are simply too glad to take the point and move on. The shootout has to stay, and I think the format will have to change in order to see fewer of them.

I thought Lebda was fine last night. No glaring mistakes other than the penalty. Penalty was aggravating because they let everything go in OT up until that call. Guys were hauling each other down and running interference left and right. It was definitely a penalty, but just frustrating when everything in OT was let go up until that point.

It's so stupid, though! It's like the defence mechanism that kicks in as soon as the Leafs start winning. I wore a Leafs hat to work (newsroom, so admittedly smart-assed people by nature) after they won the first couple games, and I must have had five or six parade comments. It's like as soon as people can't bash them for playing poorly, the parade comments have to come out to sort of justify hating the team or city. (And I'll admit, "hater" was a poor choice of word.)

All these overtime rules came along as ways to make the end of the game more exciting. Back in the age of ties, teams would shut it down in the 3rd period and overtime, and basically played to get the point. So they combated that by adding the loser point, while keeping ties. It worked for a time, but then teams decided they would rather split the two points than give their opponent an extra point (particularly in division & conference games) and again teams just held on for the tie. In fact, the season prior to the lockout produced something like 170 tie games. So here comes the shootout. But I think the problem with shootout was that the league did not alter the points structure, so teams eventually started playing to get to overtime, then playing to get to the shootout, resulting in some particularly dull 3rd periods as teams sat back and waited for the clock to run out. The problem as I see it with abolishing the points system (i.e. points for winners only) is that teams will more so than ever sit back and wait for the shootout and try their luck to get the two points. I think perhaps the solution is for two points for a regulation or overtime win and 1 point for a shootout win. If you want to add some time to the clock in order to give teams more time to decide it before the shootout, fine. The league has sort of backed itself into a corner by clearly indicating they don't like shootouts, but also don't want to go back to ties. I don't think the 'PA would agree to playing overtime until somebody wins, so I doubt it will ever get that far. All the league can do now is try to minimize the impact of the shootout and the number of them.

Is this joke ever going to get old? Even when most of Toronto is staying calm and expecting the team to come back to the pack soon, people (haters) have to crack the parade jokes.

Lebda will play tonight, making his Leafs debut. Paired up with Mike Komisarek.

I would assume it would be 4:00 on the clock, then another 4:00 if still tied.

3 years, $21 million

They still play two more games in the next couple weeks, so there will be lots of time for that if one of the games is a blowout.

Squeaked it out in OT. 4-0-0 start.