For a recreation that truly likes to tout how difficult its avid gamers are, hockey avid gamers don’t appear to have a lot tolerance for the rest that makes them really feel unhealthy within the slightest. No less than at the ice. Morgan Rielly of Toronto was once simply the newest to rainy himself when an opponent reminded him just a bit an excessive amount of that the Leafs had misplaced a sport:
Do you know that Ridly Greig was once breaking some unwritten rule that you’ll’t hearth a slapshot into an empty web on the finish of the sport? In fact you didn’t, as a result of it might be a ridiculously silly rule to apply. No person cares if you happen to clinch an NBA sport with a breakaway dunk. If a participant could make {that a} 360 or opposite jam or one thing cool, such a lot the easier. Baseball avid gamers like to fill their pants about dumb stuff, and but nobody turns out to thoughts when a place participant pitching sees one among his choices cracked to Jupiter.
However no, that wouldn’t do for the Leafs and Rielly, who went Dale Hunter on Greig for his obvious crossing of a line that was once simplest within the Leafs’ or Rielly’s head. And if you happen to’re questioning what sort of institutional keep watch over could be occurring inside that Leafs room, right here’s the ol’ hand-steady-on-the-tiller Sheldon Keefe on what he considered his simplest just right d-man taking himself out of motion for the following couple weeks, most likely, over a not anything:
Given two days to mirror on his feedback with the belief that Rielly is having an in-person listening to and is extra positive to omit six video games or extra, Keefe as soon as once more had his mind fluid drip down out of his mouth:
Dig up, silly.
The Leafs have misplaced contact with each the Panthers and Bruins within the Northeast, and now will spend the ultimate 30 video games of the season scratching and clawing with Detroit for the general computerized spot, in addition to the Wings, Islanders, and any person who else will get sizzling for even a wild-card spot. Which most likely implies that alternatively many playoff sequence the Leafs play, they received’t have house ice for any of them. No longer that that has ever stored them in recent times anyway.
Keefe most certainly must worry himself with the truth that his workforce this is loaded with velocity and scoring skill is a middling rush workforce, or that his backside six is rubbish, or that his slow-ass protection is some distance too passive, which prevents the workforce from getting out within the open ice up to it must. Or that their goalies are both harm, unhealthy, or each.
However no, that is what the Leafs are relating to themselves with. There’s an glaring solution right here, which is that if a workforce doesn’t need an opponent hanging some taste on a game-clinching empty-net function, the right kind technique is not to in finding oneself in a state of affairs the place the goalie needs to be pulled in opposition to by way of some distance the department’s worst workforce. Don’t need to see the workforce at the different bench have fun a win? Nice, beat them. Differently, take the loss and close up. However in Toronto, nobody ever accepts the rest they usually undoubtedly by no means close up about it. Pass, Leafs, Pass.
