I can still remember the days when the Leafs fought for first place in the conference, when "playoffs" weren't merely part of a Leafs joke punchline. I remember the energy of the crowd, the excitement in the atmosphere that could be felt even through the television screen, the hundred-dollar tickets that were almost kind of worth buying.
Opening Day seems like such a distant memory. And the earlier part of the decade when the Leafs were allowed to make the playoffs feels like a different lifetime. I'm not old enough to remember 1967.
Still, it can sometimes be entertaining to watch the Leafs. I'll admit, I haven't really been watching them too often recently, and when I have, they've lost. I'm looking right now at a 2-0 game, Leafs trailing the Philadelphia Junkmail. 3-0 now. OK, that's something to add to the list before the list even starts - pretty goal there by the other team. That can sometimes be kind of enjoyable when you don't have much hope for your own team to begin with.
Why no hope? Well, they've sucked this season, for one. But they've sucked even more when I've watched:
Oct 1: OTL 3-4... Oct 3: L 4-6... Oct 10: L 2-5... Oct: 13 L 1-4... Oct 24 L 1-3... Oct 26 W 6-3... Oct 28 OTL 3-4... Nov 3 OTL 1-2... Nov 13 L 2-3... Nov 19 OTL 5-6... Nov 30 L 0-3... Dec 5 L 2-7... Dec 9 W 3-2... Dec 10 L 2-5... Dec 16... L 3-6... Dec 21 OTL 2-3... Dec 26 OTL 2-3... Jan 2 L 1-3.
Tally it up and they're 2-10-6 when I've watched. A total of 10/36 possible points. That's kind of depressing...
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OK, I took a break from writing this, and between then and now, the Leafs took advantage of a 5-on-3 by learning which net to shoot on (aiming at it once or twice) and promptly forgetting (after Gustavsson strangely headed a puck, Stempniak appeared to try to knock the rebound in, much to the pleasure of the vacuous Philadelphia Adware fans (I'm not referring to the attendance). Sweet. Another kind-of-interesting thing to watch.
Other things of note: not sure who the TSN announcers are, but one of them seems to insist on anglicizing every European player's name. I can see why you'd say, "Alex Ponikarovsky", but "Rick Wallin" is stretching it a little, especially when followed by "Michael Grabovski" and "Nicholas Kulemin". And a big semi-demi- truly halfhearted laugh at how he declared Jonas Gustavsson "by far the best Leaf tonight" and then calling "Rick Wallin", just minutes later, "the best Leaf tonight by far".
On second thought, I kind of wish the Leafs were competitive once again. If I wanted to make observations about crappy announcers, I wouldn't have cheered when Jamie Campbell got demoted. And if I wanted to sort of laugh at things that aren't really all the funny, I'd go rent a garbage John Hughes movie.
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Another break, and the game has ironically become truly interesting. A bunch of quick goals traded between the two teams, some fights (to me, looks like the Philadelphia Phisher players generally got the worst of that). And the Philadelphia Spam just scored again. Apparently, some idiot Philadelphia fans (yes, a redundancy, which is grammatically incorrect, but whatever) threw their hats onto the ice. You guys gotta wait 'til one guy scores three times in one game. That's the rule, like it or not. I'd like to give them mthe benefit of the doubt and assume that they can count to three. Or '93.
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