(Cross-posted at my liitle piece of the basement.)


If one image can capture the single biggest difference between the hockey of the 80s and the hockey of today, it's this one.  Leaf goalie Allan Bester is shown here getting his crease in order as what appears to be a linesman (but could just as easily be a teammate) gets ready for a faceoff.  Some of the obvious things about him are the old cage-style mask (which was pretty new at the time, many goalies were still wearing fibreglass masks) and the heavier, older equipment.

Look, though, at the size of him - or more specifically, the lack of size of him.  The amount of net he gives up just standing there is unbelieveable.

Allan Bester was small.  He was listed at 5'7" and just 152 pounds, and even then that made him one of the smaller goalies in the NHL - but not dramatically so.  In 1986-87, There were three other 5'7" goalies (Richard Brodeur, Doug Keans and Jacques Cloutier) and one at 5'6" (Roberto Romano).  The bulk of NHL netminders stood between 5'8" and 5'10" (42 of 64 total).  Contrast that to today, where no netminder is below 5'10", only 10 in total are less that 6' and the bulk (57 of 85) are between 6'1" and 6'3".

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(Note - this actually was written yesterday, but I got pulled away before I could publish.)

52 years ago tonight, March 11, 1959, the Leafs had a home game they really needed to win if they wanted to keep their playoff hopes alive.  Facing first-place Montreal, they got pounded 6-2.  This loss put them 10 games under .500 at 22-32-11 and left them pretty much buried in fifth place, seven points back of the New York Rangers with only five to play.

Those Leafs were kind of a funny team.  They were inconsistent.  They'd look like world beaters one minute and then get smoked by a weak team the next.

There had been a ton of roster turnover.  They were dependent on a lot of young players at key spots - both on the blue line and up front.  Severely lacking in depth at centre, the GM had plugged holes with minor leaguers he'd known from other organizations and other teams' castoffs.  A goalie brought in for depth purposes ended up the season as the clear starter. 

The Leaf season would end on April 18 with another loss to Montreal.  This time, it was 5-3 at the Forum.  That was game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final.

Between those two losses came a pretty wild ride.  The Leafs would run the table, winning their last five.  This included a pair against the Rangers, who lost six of their last seven.  The Leafs would come back from two goals down on the very last game of the season to clinch a playoff spot, something Punch Imlach called the most exciting moment of his career - moreso even than the four Cup wins he'd later have.

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I remember listening to a game on the car radio in about 1999, and the newly-resurgent Leafs were icing three kid defensemen that I felt would be the core of an excellent blue line for the next ten years.

That blue line never came to pass, at least not in that form.  Bryan Berard was effectively finished by a wayward Marian Hossa stick (I still feel this cost the Leafs at least one Stanley Cup - think about some of those teams that were close and add an in-his-prime Berard to them) and Danny Markov was dealt.  Within just a couple years, only one of those three was still with the team.  Eleven years later, Tomas Kaberle has finally moved on, as well.

Tomas Kaberle was the surprise of the 1998 training camp.  Nobody expected the sixth-rounder to make the team.  Throughout that camp, though, he simply belonged and there was no denying him.  The word "poise" has been beaten to death over the years, but Tomas had it.  Nothing ruffled him.  At just 20 years of age, he looked 15 but played like he was 35.

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I've talked before about Cardboard Gods, both the book (which I am now halfway through) and the blog, which is basically a team-agnostic baseball-oriented Leaf of the Day (which I have been very lax with, I know).

Quietly, though, Cardboard Gods has been waging/documenting one of the most dramatic battles of our time.  In a single-combat winner-takes-all showdown, Love is facing off against Hate.  Sadly, as it seems to occur far too often in this world, hate is on the verge of winning, with love literally down to its last strikes.  I don't know what it says for us all if this is indeed the final conclusion, but it sure can't say anything good.

I've long been of the opinion that there are no redeeming qualities in 1978 baseball.  The set is boring, the design is meh, the card backs are mud-brown and have all the pizazz of yesterday's left-open ginger ale.  Where in other years there would have been a cartoon and some minor factoid, there is instead a not-terribly inspiring kids' game called "Play Ball".  It is so uninspiring that in thirty-plus years of owning various instances of 1978 baseball cards, I have not once felt compelled to play it.

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Today (Jan 18) at 8:00 p.m., tonight at 12:30 a.m. and tomorrow at 12:30 p.m., LeafsTV will be showing a Leafs/Rangers game from Mar. 16, 1957.  Given that the games were not broadcast in their entirety at that time, this will pick up in the second period.

The Leafs paste the Rangers 14-1, but this is notable because Ted Kennedy will pick up four assists and these are the last points of his NHL career.  He gets one of them in the first, so three might be part of this broadcast.

Kennedy had retired for the first time in 1955 and the Leafs went into serious transition mode.  In 1956-57, though, they were torn apart by injuries, so he made a comeback in December.  In 30 games, he had 22 points.  His skating, somewhat laboured at the best of times, wasn't really where it needed to be.  At the end of the season, the Leafs wanted to take a look at a kid named Frank Mahovlich, so Kennedy retired again.  Mahovlich's first Leaf practice was Kennedy's last.

In the clip below, they suggest that Mar.16 was his last game.  I think it's actually the next one, also a Leaf win over the Rangers, the following night.  This would have left three games in the schedule, which matches what Mahovlich played in 1956-57.

Either way, this is the first time I've ever seen a game broadcast on LeafsTV that's old enough to have Kennedy in the lineup.  It'll be the first chance to watch him in action.

My grandparents had a dog who was so horrible he was wonderful.  He was old, short, fat and grumpy.  He had a dent in one eye, teeth that stuck out at odd angles and he smelled bad - so bad, that the cat would eventually decide to bath him herself just so she could tolerate his presence.  He'd let anyone into the house, then bite you in the ankles on the way out.  The grandkids, of course, loved him.  Best dog ever.

Some card sets are the same way.  They're so bad that they actually become kind of compelling.  Some feel that way about the initial Pro Set attempt - the set where every other card had the name misspelled and the rest had factual errors.  That's not really one of my favourites (I can't get that enthralled about "Ray Borque") because it's badness was more a factor of being rushed to market and general sloppiness.  The badness I like is more the "what on earth were they thinking?" variety, badness that was actually meant to be good.

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Over the holidays, one of the games we played was Scrabble.  Our eldest got it from her grandparents.  Now, I have never particularly liked Scrabble, and this is why:  the very first game we played, I took my seven pieces from the pile and wound up (in order) with the following - T O S K A A C. 

Toskaca.

No game that torments you this way should be permitted to exist (NHL hockey and Leaf games in particular excluded).

Repeated games of Scrabble, however, were far better than some of the other games we played - things like "Fever, Fever, who's got the fever?" and "It's 3 a.m., does this mean the blue medicine or the pink one?"

So needless to say, for the past several weeks it was "it's three o'clock and most are sick" rather than "all's well."  Of course, everyone is fine in time to go to school.  :)

In unrelated news, I now have a blog.  I've been so excited over it and so proud of it that it has lain dormant for over two months, with nothing but the default "Hello World" post and a comment that says (seriously) "This is a comment."  I am nonetheless thrilled to have not one but TWO places where I don't post often enough.  It does, however, give me a place for a post about Johnny Bench that I just can't find a Leaf angle for.  In other unrelated news, I ate a Maple Leaf doughnut today.  It was so exciting that I blogged about it. 

Maybe I should just play more Scrabble instead.

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It has been a while.  Aside from normal bouts of busy-ness (as opposed to business, which is also true but not what I wanted to imply), large bits have been falling of the car and I have been patiently explaining to them that they should stop.  My skills at reasoning with inanimate objects clearly aren't what they once were as I am now paying someone else to reason with them somewhat more forcefully.

Here we see Julie, Gabe Kotter's wife, voiding the humanity of the mostly-harmless Arnold Horshack.  Julie was a generally-sympathetic character in the series, though not in this instance.  Gabe Kotter himself is out of the picture somewhere, though we trust that he's there (or pretend that we do).  After all, what is "Welcome Back, Kotter" without the Kotter?

This, interestingly (or not), foreshadows the 1978 season, in which the series tried to survive the increasing inavailability of its two primary actors.  John Travolta was becoming more and more of a big deal and was so busy with his burgeoning movie career that there was precious little time left for the sitcom.  To round out the Sweathogs, they added a new character named Beau, an import from Louisiana who shared some basic characteristics of Barbarino (less the charm) but never managed to really mesh with the the gang or the show.

Every bit as troublesome was the absence of Kotter himself.  Gabe Kaplan wasn't around a ton and so his character was "promoted" to vice-principal, explaining why he was never teaching or visible in any way.  (Need Gabe?  Let's call him on the phone!  No, you can't hear his voice, but he's there, trust us.)  It didn't work.  Other shows dealt with this.  Happy Days survived the loss of Richie.  The less said of Coy and Vance Duke, though, the better.

At the end of the day, 1978 highlighted something Julie doesn't seem to realize in the card above.  It's easy enough to get rid of someone, to kick them to the curb along with the rest of the garbage.  The trick is in replacing them.

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There are a few cards that stand out above all the others as my favourites.  They'll have some perfectly-captured moment, beautifully-framed, that is somehow set apart from the rest of a bulk product sold to kids at twenty-five cents per pack.  This is one of them.

Here's Wendel Clark getting ready for battle.  The anthems are still playing, the game approaches.  He's still in his teens, an NHL rookie wowing a town that's been watching it's team fall apart one way or another for a decade and a half.  They've just come off a last-place finish and the prize was this tasmanian devil of a player.  He could hit, fight, score, all of it well.  He'd get jobbed out of the Calder mainly because he'd lose 14 games to a busted foot.  Without that, he probably scores 45 goals.  There's no sense of the injuries to come, just the greatness.  He's all upside.

There are two images of Wendel Clark in my mind's eye.  He's the captain doing everything he could to will the team to win in 1993 and 1994, and he's this raw rookie setting a jaded hockey town on its ear.  These images are timeless and ageless.

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One of the more pleasant things about this season's Leafs team is the absence of a cringe-worthy goaltender.  Now, the past handful of seasons have been particularly bad in that the goalie to strike fear into the hearts of teammates and fans alike was actually the starter, but even in times when the starter was good, the backup was generally someone the team tried to hide. 

There were moments, I suppose.  The GRBRZRKER arrived and played OK for a bit, J.S. Aubin took the team on an improbable run and Corey Schwab shocked pretty much everyone by stepping in and holding the fort for a month when Curtis Joseph broke his hand.  For the most part, though, if you knew that Trevor Kidd, Glenn Healy, Don Beaupre or whoever was going to be starting, you approached the game with a bit of trepidation.  Even Tellqvist, who was probably the best of the lot, never inspired a ton of confidence.

To me, the last Leaf backup who was a perfectly acceptable starter for any given game was Damian Rhodes.  I know that for me, if I heard that Rhodes was getting a start, my reaction was never, "Oh (expletive deleted)."  It was simply, "oh, that's OK."  If the Leafs were to lose that night, it wouldn't be because of the goaltending.

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Last year on Remembrance Day, I talked about Alan "Scotty" Davidson.  If there's one player in Toronto history that I'd like to have added to the traditional Leaf mythology, it's Davidson.  For those who forgot, he was the captain of the 1914 Blueshirts, an emerging star and leader of his team.  Fresh off his victory, he enlisted in the military and was part of the first wave of recruits in WWI.  He served in Europe and was killed in Flanders in 1915.  If he'd been part of any other team, there would be a trophy named after him.  Unfortunately, he was a Blueshirt, and they were wiped from the collective memory banks.

Toronto had other players enlist, though.  The Second World War saw a great number of players walk away from the prime of their career to serve.  Of those, few were of higher profile than Leaf captain Syl Apps.

When you get into the stories of most players, they basically come off as human.  They have their strengths and their faults, some tending more to one side than the other, as we all do.  Syl Apps, though, reads as though he was something dreamed up by a comic-book writer.  Tall, athletic, a beautiful skater with fantastic hands, he captained one of the most famous hockey teams on the planet to multiple championships.  At the same time, he's the sort of ramrod-straight character who never so much as utters a curse word.  He's Clark Kent as well as Superman.  Jack Batten described him as "the Stainless Hero."

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One of my newfound favourite blogs is Cardboard Gods.  It's run by a kid from the 70s who takes his old baseball cards and uses each as an entry point into some dissertation on life.  In other words, he's basically me, except that he's American, focuses on baseball and has a book.  It looks like a good book, too.  I've asked someone else to actually spend their hard-earned money on it so's I can have a copy for my birthday.

The author's card collecting adventure seems to have begun in 1974 at the age of six.  I wasn't six until two years later, and my first cards weren't hockey.  They weren't even baseball.  They were ten-cent packs of Welcome Back Kotter cards, purchased from a camp store at Pine Lake, Alberta, where we'd go with the neighbours several weekends each summer for 2-3 years.  I don't think I even watched that show until about 1978, but I had the cards.

My original thought for these was to use them in a one-off Collector's Corner installment about the other types of things you could get from OPC and Topps in the olden days. 

Now that my horizons have been expanded by Cardboard Gods, though, I am going to take a deeper look and see just what they can tell us about the human experience of fandom.  My suspicion is that they won't tell us much at all, but hey, I'm a gamer.  Besides, it beats talking about the Leafs.

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A number of years back (three is a number, you could look it up), the Leafs had their celebration of the 1967 Cup team.  They brought as many of the old players back as they could (Eddie Shack was golfing in the middle east - somehow that fits) and feted them at centre ice.  Each player, as he was introduced, got a little speech that talked about who he was and what he did and a moment to enjoy the spotlight.  Larry Hillman was finally recognized for the great playoff run he had, and Keon even showed up.  It was a great night.

When it was first announced, a number of people I knew who were fans of other teams were simply incredulous.  They couldn't get their heads around the idea that a team would not only acknowledge not winning a championship in 40 years, they'd make an event out of it.  My response now is the same as it was then - you should never put off celebrating people who matter, because you never know when it's going to be too late.  Ace Bailey, for example, was to be present at his own banner raising, but there was a delay (the week-long strike in '92, IIRC) and we lost him before it could happen.

This is why - even though it seems kind of overdone at times - I like the little pre-game ceremonies the Leafs had for random ex-players.  They had a nice one for Wally Stanowski, who has to be about 90.  I'd bet that 90% of the fans had no idea who he was when they came to the game, but they all knew him by the end.  This matters.

The only thing that was too bad about the '67 reunion is that that Cup wasn't a one-off - it was the fourth in six seasons.  There was a broader dynasty than just that one win and personally, I'd have tended to broaden the event and bring some of the players back who were big parts of the first three, even if they missed out on that last one.  Guys like Bob Nevin, Dick Duff, Ron Stewart, Don Simmons, Al Arbour, Andy Bathgate and Don McKenny all were contributors, some were real fan favourites and it was a bit of an opportunity lost.

Eddie Litzenberger fits that profile, too. 

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Sometimes a hot start is the beginning of something special, other times it's not.

The patron saint of the hot start that goes nowhere has to be Norm Aubin of the Leafs.  Norm was a scoring sensation in the Quebec league who was a third-round pick of the Leafs in 1979, 51st overall.

Norm had decent size and put up a ton of numbers, yet he was only rated #22 in the draft.  There was obviously something the scouts didn't like.  Given that it wasn't size, my guess is skating.  Of course, a couple years earlier, another high-scoring Quebec leaguer named Mike Bossy fell to #15 because of questions about his skating, so it was never a given.  He was certainly worth a shot at 51.

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If James Mirtle happens to wander by today and read this, there's a question I wish he would ask:

What is the status of Tyler Bozak's hearing?

I saw that he was one of the game stars the other day, which bodes well, but I've heard a lot of criticism of his play and nobody seems to recall that he's been playing with an injury.  Getting hit in the ear cost him something like 30% of the hearing on one side of his head and he admitted that he was noticing it out on the ice, that he had to listen for teammates (or opponents) out of the other side and sort of guess where the sound was coming from.  They can swear up and down that this had no impact on his play, but I can't say I particularly believe them.  It was to take a couple of weeks before they knew whether there would be any permanent damage, and it's been at least that by now.  So what's the news?

Obviously, any loss of Bozak's skill set would be a royal mess for this team, given the state of the centres they have to work with.  Whether you love or hate Grabbo, he can't be the only scoring option down the middle. 

When I've heard this team described as following the Leaf prototype (I may have even been the one doing the describing - I'll have to look it up) of the grand old teams of yore, it should be mentioned that there's one significant way in which they're different.  All those teams were stacked down the middle. 

A somewhat forgotten part of Hap Day's defensive system was the ability to counterpunch.  He liked to ensure that he had at least one competent offensive player on the ice at any given moment, because turnovers would happen and you needed someone who knew what to do with the puck once they got it.  As such, every forward line needed one good weapon.

While it was not unknown for the Leafs to trade away scoring wingers, particularly those who couldn't fit the system (see names like Fleming Mackell, Gaye Stewart, Gordie Drillon), they would move heaven and earth for a skilled centre.  Probably no case greater illustrates this than Max Bentley.

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I was listening to Jeff Blair this morning talking about rivalries (and really the lack thereof) in hockey.  I didn't catch the beginning of it, so I don't know if he just wasn't feeling the love for Leafs-Rangers hockey or whether there was something else in play.  He talked a lot, though, about the perceived decline in Leafs/Habs and Leafs/Sens as well as the old Battle of Alberta, etc.

A couple of interesting points came out of it, though nothing that hasn't been discussed here any number of times.  Rivalries are really born in the playoffs and the two teams need to be at least reasonably evenly-matched.  Boston and Montreal have a lot going because they seem to meet in the playoffs every other year.  The Battle of Ontario came out of four playoff matchups.  The Leafs most heated battles over the past decade or so have come against New Jersey and Philadelphia.

I think that it was a mistake to give up the old divisional playoff format, though admittedly it would need some tweaking with six divisions. (How about making four big ones?)  When the Leafs were in the old Norris, you knew that if they made the playoffs, they'd be fighting their way through the Blues, Hawks or Wings (never seemed to be the North Stars, luck of the draw).  Same with the Habs and Bruins in the Adams.  The Leafs came over to the East for 1998-99 and people drooled over the prospect of a division with Boston, Montreal and Buffalo in it, yet in all that time, the only one of those teams the Leafs faced was Buffalo, and that was 11 years ago.  It doesn't even really feel like a division, in that sense. 

The other thing that came up was that as a fan, the perception of rivalry is really an age-based thing.  A hab fan growing up in the 70s and 80s would really look to Boston and Quebec.  For me, as a Leaf fan from the Norris era, the key rival is Detroit.  The Leafs and Wings were bad at the same time, they came out of it at pretty much the same time and they fought like wildcats every time they played.  I've never enjoyed the Leafs being in the east as much as in the west, and the loss of teams like Detroit is a big part of it.  Beating Ottawa four times out of four was a lot of fun, let's not kid ourselves, but beating Detroit was simply awesome.

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I actually did my homework.  I just never turned it in.

Back when Mt. Puckmore was all the rage, mf37 had the interesting suggestion that we approach our elders and find out who was on their Mt. Puckmore - the thought being that our choices and weightings might be a generational thing.

I first asked my mother who would be on her list.  I got one surprise in that I had anticipated her to question our exclusion of Dave Keon.  I was wrong.  It was the exclusion of Johnny Bower that had her shocked.  For the record, her list was Bower, Keon, Mahovlich, McDonald.

We then moved on to my grandparents' generation.  For my paternal grandmother, we felt that her list would have had only one name on it - whether the mountain would need four separate images of Turk Broda or just one really big one would be up to the artist.  Grandma never even really followed who the later Leaf goalies even were.  If they weren't Broda, it wasn't really relevant.

My maternal grandfather was trickier.  A rabid Leaf fan more or less forever, he could spin yarns about pretty much anyone.  We tried to derive a top four.  We got through Horton, Meeker and Kennedy and then kind of hit a wall.  My mother then suggested that the correct answer was really anyone who could score against Montreal.  "He absolutely hated Montreal."  Fair enough.

My grandfather's era of Leaf fandom spanned Conacher, Primeau and Jackson through Gilmour, Andreychuk and Clark.  He followed the triumphs and failures of the Gashouse Gang, the powerhouse teams of the forties, the decade-long rebuild of the fifties, four more champions in the sixties and then the entire Ballard era.  You name it, he saw it.  (Now, prior to about 1933, given his age and place of birth, he was probably - gasp - an original Senators fan.  He got over it, though.  This was never spoken of publicly.)

There has always been a hole in the Leaf of the Day coverage - if a player didn't have a card produced (and I didn't happen to have it), he couldn't be Leaf of the Day.  One problem with this is that there were many years, sometimes entire decades, where no cards were produced - the entire 1940s is most obvious of these.  The players from those teams disappear into the LotD ether.

It's not that kids had nothing to collect in those years, though.  Kids of that era would send in various proofs of purchase to the Bee Hive Corn Syrup Company, Crown Brand, Quaker Oats or whoever and would get glossy black and white stills back.  This is what they collected, traded and laid out on the floor while listening to the games on the radio.

For this year's tribute team, I want to look primarily at these players from the time when Bee Hive reigned supreme.  I will refer to these as My Grandfather's Leafs.

For anyone who ever played cards with me, I never like leading trump on an opening hand.  So for today, I have a hall of famer, but a guy whose in the hall as a builder rather than a player.

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As per thinkgeek, there are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't. 

Back on the first, @RobCollingwood tipped me to the fact that I'd been napping and missed out on a binary date.  Today, with that great ugly 8 (or 9, depending) in it, is not one, but there will have been two by the end of the long weekend.  Sunday, when I'll hopefully be knee-deep in turkey, will be 10-10-10 (I like this one because there's no debate as to which order things run.  My preference is YY-MM-DD.)  This, of course, is 42.

Number 42 would ordinarily be BOZAK!!!1  I have a personal bugaboo about having current Leafs as LotD (it's bad luck, I've tracked it) which leaves (Leafs?) me with names such as David Cooper and Kyle Wellwood.  Kyle wins.

All it took was one poolside shot of a somewhat well-nourished Kyle Wellwood talking to a rather attractive female type to label him forever as lazy and out of shape.  His play, of course, had a little to do with that as well.

It was a real disappointment for me because I was a serious Kyle Wellwood fan.  He was my favourite prospect and well on his way to becoming my favourite Leaf.

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And so it begins again....

This year marks the sixth season I've been doing the Leaf of the Day.  They have yet to make the playoffs.  I continue to maintain that this is not my fault, and I will continue to make this joke every season until such time as the Leafs either make the playoffs or it is conclusively proven that these past few seasons actually are my fault, at which point I will slink off into a hole somewhere and disappear.

This season also marks 20 years since the 1990-91 disaster, which I won't be profiling in detail since it has been done to death, mostly by me.  On a personal note, it was also 20 years ago this winter that I made the decision to drop out of journalism school because if there was one thing I knew, it was that I had no desire at all to live a life in which I had to come up with some new story line day after day and get it published for a bunch of strangers to read. 

Funny how things work out.

Anyhow, to the professor that made the comment (not aimed at me, particularly) that cemented that decision in my mind, thanks for sending me on a very interesting 20-year journey.  I've done and been a number of different things and I wouldn't trade any of it.  Well, maybe I'd trade Gretzky high stick thing.  I could have done without that.  The rest is a keeper.

Now, every year I try to kick things off with a player who embodies something I'd like to see in the Leafs and this year, it's Paul Henderson.  Paul was never a superstar, just a solid pro who could come up big when he needed to.  He had good wheels and could play a solid game at either end of the rink.  Even though a number of Leaf teams he played on didn't fare all that well, Paul was never a minus player during his NHL career (at least in the seasons where the stat was tracked).

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(This is Collector's Corner #9, I think. It has been a while.)

The objective of each new day is to learn something.  Yesterday, I learned that if I want to write anything on this site, I'd better not be reading it.  I was merrily into a Simon Gamache Leaf of the Day piece when I decided to verify a handful of my comments.  Off to the web I went, stopping on the front page and immediately heading down the rabbit hole of 5v5 save percentage.  So much for Simon. 

As it turns out, though, what I did find about Simon made him less useful than I had hoped, so he can go back into the pile.  Today's Leaf was actually going to be Tomas Kaberle, but we've had enough posts on him for the moment.

So let's do collectibles instead.

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The signs are everywhere: hockey is coming back.  The Blue Jays are done, having completed about the most enjoyable fourth-place season I can remember.  The weather is crisp and October-like.  At the school bus this morning, there were winter coats everywhere along with a smattering of gloves and scarves. 

Talk around the office is of hockey parents comparing notes on their kids' first handful of games.  My kids don't play, but they do skate, so I'm back in the arena on Saturday mornings.  Sitting in the gallery with the other parents, coffee in hand, I watch 60+ kids learn to glide.  There's nothing like the local arena this time of year.  It feels great.

My eldest son found an old McDonald's card of "future star" Marty Brodeur in a box somewhere and asked if he could have it.  He was so pleased with it that he carried it for the rest of the night and even took it to bed.  The girls promptly asked why they didn't get hockey cards.  (Note to the kids - the house is full of them.  Help yourselves.)  They know hockey is coming.

So why am I not pumped?

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One of the reasons I've kept up with the Leaf of the Day for as long as I have is that I learn something new each time I write one.  It's not always something profound.  With Bunny Larocque, for example, the only new thing I learned the other day was that he was in net when the Sabres scored nine times in one period, a still-standing NHL record.  I also learned a couple of things about Jiri Crha that will serve me well eventually.

It does happen, though, that I learn a lot about someone.  Perhaps the best example of this is Jack Shill.

I'd never heard of Jack when I picked up his card.  I bought it because I hardly had any 1936-37s and the name made me smile.  I'd heard TSN and various others described as "Leaf shills" often enough that I thought it would be funny to have a literal Shill for the LotD. 

As for Jack himself, I assumed he was some fringe guy that happened to have had a card made that year.  In large measure, that's what he was, but he turned out to be pretty interesting, all the same.  Everyone has a story.  Jack has a few.

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A number of years ago I was at a conference for Oracle users.  During one of the sessions, the presenter put up a slide with a number of hockey names on it, most of which were then-current NHLers.  The exception was the goaltender. 

"Does anyone know who Bunny Larocque was?"

Given that this was a mostly American audience, there was not a whole lot of response.  Finally, I put up my hand.

"Yes," I said, "he's quite possibly the worst starting goaltender in the entire history of the Toronto Maple Leafs."

The speaker was sort of taken aback.  "Well, that's true, I guess," he said, and then proceeded to make his point about Bunny being the ultimate backup (not particularly certain I agree, but that's neither here nor there) and then launched into whatever point he wanted to make about backup utilities.  The presenter and I later agreed that whatever else was true, Bunny had a kickin' mask.

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One of the things that struck me as interesting about the requests that came in for LotD candidates was that a cluster of them are associated with the single most depressing team I have ever seen - the 1990-91 Leafs.  That, of course, was the "did we really trade Eric Lindros for Tom Kurvers" season, in which a young team beset by injuries to key players was gutted just enough to finish second-last.   ("Hooray!  It's only some kid named Niedermayer!)  This year marks the 20th anniversary of that hallowed season, making them a great candidate for this year's tribute team.

Hmm - I think not.

As hideous as that year was, though, no season is complete without at least one interesting highlight.  For 1990-91, one of the leading candidates has to be the play of Dave "Rocket" Reid.

Dave was an unheralded mid-summer pickup in 1988.  He'd had a number of cups of coffee with Boston - a couple of which were even quite promising - but had simply never been able to stick.  The Leafs were always experimenting with other teams' castoffs (the season could never begin without a waiver-wire pickup at the end of training camp) and Dave fit that bill.  He'd shown scoring potential before, maybe he could do it again.

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A little housekeeping first - the admission that we do, in fact, take requests has raised the total to the completely unprecedented number of three.  Daniel Marois, as is turns out, is ready to come back in the rotation so I'll get to him sometime this year.  Lonny Bonhonos is someone I was about to say had never, ever been on a card with the Leafs.  I thought, though, that I should verify this first and what did I find?  Card 403 in the 1999-00 Pacific Set is none other than Lonny Bohonos.  Off to ebay I go.  Five dollars and twenty-five cents later (plus shipping and currency conversion), I am the proud owner of a 1999-00 Pacific Leafs team set.  This also contains Garry Valk, Alexander Karpovtsev, Derek King and Sylvain Cote, none of whom have ever been Leaf of the Day, so don't say I never do anything for you all.

I also picked up Dmitri Khristich, Ron Francis and the ever-elusive Sean McKenna.  That one will be fun.  Oh - and I do have a Warriner somewhere, just not scanned as yet.

Going back to the subject of relearning things I thought I knew, I have long held that Peter Ihnacak scored the first Leaf goal I ever saw in person.  I even have a picture of it.  I took it using my dad's old instamatic with auto flash.  You can clearly see a vaguely sepia-toned image of what looks like ants in celebration.  Under extreme magnification, you can make out the numbers 21 (Salming) and 2 (Nylund) and then a bunch of fuzz, one part of which is Peter Ihnacak.  I also got a picture of the scoreboard, announcing the goal scorer as Peter Ihnacak, scoring his 15th.

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Normally, if there's a player who hasn't been the Leaf of the Day for more than a year, I'll save him for the regular season.  This time, however, I have a request.  This is shocking for a couple of reasons.  The first is that I always say "we do requests," but almost nobody ever takes me up on it.  The second is that this is evidence that someone other than my immediate family actually reads these things, which always surprises me to no end.

There's always a player out there who lights up your team despite having relatively modest stats against everyone else.  Mike Craig was one of those guys.  Whenever the Leafs would play Minnesota - probably my least favourite Norris opponent - Craig looked like a budding star.  He played a tough, physical game, had a bit of an agitator in him and scored timely goals.  Reminds me of sort of a young Brenden Morrow today - the sort of player that drives you nuts while killing your team.

At the end of the year, you'd look at the stats and see he only had 15 goals and wonder how this could be possible, given that he probably had at least five of them against the Leafs.

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With the return of preseason hockey comes the return of the Leaf of the Day.  For the uninitiated, the Leaf of the Day (LotD) is a tribute to players who wore the blue and white with distinction - either that or crazy shots of 70s hair.  Sometimes the LotD will have some tangental connnection to current events, more often it won't.  It'll be some choice that makes an odd sort of sense, at least to me.  If, after reading it, the connection is clear to you, then I've won.

During the preseason I get to cop out and re-use some of last season's pictures.  I have a finite number of scans ready (the qualification for being the LotD is that a player must have appeared on some sort of card and I must have one of them sitting in the basement somewhere) and the re-runs let me stretch that out. 

We do take requests - but if the player was LotD last year and his name is not Wendel Clark, then the answer is probably not.  Gotta be two seasons since the last time someone was LotD unless there's something compelling.  Or unless I feel like it.  Whatever comes first.  :)

Today's LotD is Denis Dupere.  Denis was a checker with good size and some wheels and clearly limited hands (though he was good on the draw).  The Leafs picked him up from the Rangers in the Tim Horton deal.

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Note - as this is not an official Leaf of the Day post I reserve the right to re-use Jim Pappin at a point of my own choosing for whatever nefarious purpose strikes me as a good idea at the time.

My baseball reading this past summer was Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer.  It had been on my to-do list ever since I reacquired Jack Batten's The Leafs in Autumn and saw that it was among his inspirations. 

It's a masterwork.  I don't know how to describe it otherwise.  While I love The Leafs in Autumn, Kahn's work has a whole extra dimension to it because he relates to the team not just as a fan, but as an insider.  He worshipped the Dodgers growing up, covered them as a young man and now rejoins them twenty years later. The writing is spectacular, drawing you into every aspect of his and the players' lives and the relationship between them.  If you only have time for one sports book, this should be it.  (Thus ends the book report.  Sales is not my job.)

I mention this book because there was one little event in it that has stuck with me from the moment I read it.  A young Roger Kahn has just been assigned the Dodger beat and is now meeting not only the players he will cover but also the writers from competing papers - the people he'll be working with and against.  Dick Young, already a legend in New York sports reporting, sits Kahn down over a drink and gives him three pieces of advice.  The first two obviously weren't that compelling because I can't remember either of them.  The third, though, gave me pause and thus ensured that I remember it.

"Don't be so damned sure."

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Editor's Note: Here's another Mount Puckmore this time from our resident historian.

I've tried coming up with a lead paragraph that cleanly explains my thought process in making these choices.  They haven't worked.  Instead, I'm going to jump straight into my list and explain each choice as I get there.  (Apologies for the formatting, apparently you aren't allowed to centre things in fanposts anymore.  The more one learns....)

My Mount Puckmore Four:

Hap Day
Ted Kennedy
Doug Gilmour
Bill Barilko

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