Hope Svech earns a spot and stays up and someone like Abby gets healthy scratched or waived when AA gets healthy. Still not scaring a lot of people, but Hirose-AA-Svech would at least be a fun line to watch develop
Kuffner and Kaski already sent back down. Sounds like they were called up just to be in town and practice one session with the team in case they were needed
Excellent loss last night to bad Anaheim team. I was starting to get a little nervous. I feel very comfortable again.
I get excited when the first line, Athansiou, Hirose, Cholowski and Hronek are on the ice. Literally when anyone else hits the ice I want to turn the channel.
Luke Glendening has been real solid this season. This team has a lot of fun younger talent. Still a ton of dead weight, but there will for sure be more entertainment value with this team.
If Redzone channel existed for the first line and power play that would be the dream. They'll come back to earth and teams will start to lock into our threats but definitely looks to be a more fun year. Personally, I hope they don't flirt with playoffs and make a short sighted move to try and make it. I want another high draft pick and at least another 1-2 years of cleaning up the books/seasoning the kids in GR right now before making a legitimate run. In the scenario where Seider progresses well is able to play in the next couple years who/what kind of player in theory is a good partner for him?
I think this is the last year we dont make the playoffs (so I hope we dump as many non-rebuild assets as we can before the deadline).
Ideally you add another top pick, but you'll never hear me complain about winning with our young talent thriving. I'd take a borderline playoff year and miss out at the end with Larkin, Mantha, AA and Bertuzzi all breaking out and guys like cholowski, hronek and eventually Svech and Ras contributing over them all regressing and having a better pick
Was at the game tonight. I swear Toronto just busses people in for our games. And they drink non stop the whole four hour bus ride and continue to pound them back during the game. Anytime anyone in our section went to the bathroom or to get food or anything, a group of drunk Leafs fans would just sit in their seats. And it wasnt just 1 or 2 of them, there was a large group of leafs fans just seat hopping all game in people's seats. I also think Go Leafs Go is the only thing they say.
Hirose should go to GR. He looks completely lost out there tonight. This isn’t a one time thing this year either. Also, I know Athanasiou has been hurt and he hasn’t played with the best line mates, but he looks awful. When he isn’t engaged he is an anchor. I am not going to be surprised if Yzerman trades him rather than risk a long term deal on him.
Rasmussen looked ready in preseason, and has 5 pts in 3 games in AHL. Call him up, maybe give Svech an opportunity too. Put Ras on the wing to keep some pressure off him, or play him at center and put AA on the wing to hope it kickstarts him. I would love to see a Svech-Ras-AA 2nd line and see what they can do. Also pretty alarming is our faceoff percentages so far. Glendening is our only center above 50%. Filppula is 11 for 39, Larkin 58 for 121, De La Rose 22 for 48, AA 9 for 23. and Nielsen 8 for 19.
I’m just gonna get this out of the way. I’m rooting for us to tank. Losing every game with the kids looking great and the olds looking like they normally do. We need to lose lots of games. Last year though, from next year here on out it is playoff expectations and then contender expectations.
Can we please put together the first line again. Instead of spreading the offense to multiple lines it's just made all our lines bad. Took away any joy this team had and makes them pretty unwatchable at this point.
Send down Hirose and Ehn, call up Svech and Smith. I don’t think Smith is anything special but he has a little scoring touch; take advantage of that. Bert - Larkin - Mantha AA - Fil - Svech Smith - Nielsen - Helm Abby - Glendening - de la Rose Plus you can let Hirose serve up dingers to Zadina in GR.
By all accounts he has played fairly well, he’s just snake bitten. Veleno hasn’t produced yet either though, which doesn’t help Zadina.
Also, we need to trade Athanasiou. He is too one dimensional and that scares me with his looking payday.
Agreed, clearly the Center experiment didn't work and for someone that has shown disgruntled tendencies in the past I'm down to trade him. Hopefully he gets on one of his heaters at some point and Yzerman can sell high.