Statistical breakdowns of player performance versus individual teams are mostly just the noise of variation. But it is hard to ignore Boston's effect on Phil Kessel.

Kessel played his first game as a Leaf on November 3, 2009. In fifteen games he scored ten goals and five assists. Kessel was, at this point, a point-a-game player, on pace to score 47 goals for the season, despite having missed the first ten games.
Then, starting on December 5, the Leafs played Boston three times in nine games, over two weeks. Kessel did not score a point against his former team. The first two games were in Boston. After the second, Kessel scored three goals in three games.
Then, Boston came to Toronto. Kessel's failure to score in Boston had been attributed to the hostile crowd and line-matching that forced Kessel to play against Zdeno Chara on every shift. It was hoped that in the friendly confines of the ACC he would do better. 
He didn't. Then he derailed. For four games, he did not score a point. Then he scored a goal--against Edmonton--his only point in nine games, and his only goal in nineteen.

This season, Kessel made another good start: he scored seven goals and two assists in eight games. Then, on Oct. 28, the Leafs went to Boston, and Kessel was kept off the scorecard again. He did not get another point for six games, and has scored only two goals in the seventeen games since.

To quote the great hockey sage Yogi Berra, "Ninety percent of this game is half mental." Somehow, playing Boston seems to sap Kessel's confidence.

What is the solution? The Leafs will face the Bruins next on January 3 at the ACC. Will Kessel be back to scoring goals by then? If he is, should Wilson bench him, lest he lose his confidence again, or would that just make things worse? And if he finally does score a goal against Boston (I mean while playing hockey, not those skills competitions the NHL keeps staging after ties) will that end the slump?

Following the Arbitrator's upholding of the NHL's rejection of Ilya Kovalchuk's contract for circumventing the CBA, the NHL claims to be "investigating" other front-loaded contracts, including those of Roberto Luongo, Chris Pronger, Marc Savard and Marian Hossa.

Arguably, Kovalchuk's contract was more extreme than the others; the 'backdive' was steeper, the term was longer and the switch from 'no move' to 'no trade' made it obvious that the late years were a sham. The point at which a contract with these features becomes circumvention has yet to be determined, which leaves lots of room to argue about future contracts.

But should Luongo et al. start looking for new deals? Invalidating their contracts won't be easy. According to Section 11.6 (b) of the CBA,

an approved and registered SPC may be subject to subsequent challenge and/or de-registration by the League: (i) in the case of a Circumvention relating to either the Club Upper Limit or the Maximum Player Salary, within sixty (60) days from the date upon which the facts of the Circumvention became known or reasonably should have been known to the NHL

Since the NHL has already approved and registered these contracts, any subsequent challenge had to be made within 60 days of the League reasonably knowing about the circumvention.

To invalidate these contracts, the NHL would have to claim it could not have reasonably known that they circumvented the CBA until, essentially, now. But the details of the contract were known long ago, and the fact that they were intended to circumvent the CBA was widely debated. Only the ruling is new, and the NHL can hardly claim it needed the ruling to realize these other guys were circumventing the cap too.

Obviously Burke and Wilson are buddy-buddy, and Wilson’s not getting fired. That’s what happening; I just don't know if it's wonderful news for Leafland.

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I watched a four-hour hockey game last night. As a Leafs fan, obviously, I planned to root for Pittsburgh. You can’t be a Leafs fan and root for Ottawa, right? Besides, watching Crosby knock the Sens out in the first round is almost like seeing him in a Leafs’ uniform. And don’t start about rooting for Americans against a Canadian team—that might work for one of the other four Canadian teams, but not Ottawa, never Ottawa. Or so I thought.

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Vesa Toskala: AKA Lost Save.

Francois Beauchemin: Him be confuse crania; For ice's anemia bunch; Nice uniform, Habs ace!

Jason Blake: Ale sank job; Jab ankle so; BS anal joke.

Luke Schenn: Nuns heckle. Suck'n NHLee. Slunk hence. Nu scene: KHL?

Phil Kessel: Sell piks, eh?

Mikhail Grabovski: Mi goal: I irk Habs, k?

Tomas Kaberle: So marketable...

Jeff Finger: Effin' J. Ferg.

(Yes, I know. I'm confused--Finger was signed by Cliff Fletcher. But I'm just a random idiot on the internet. What's Cliff's excuse?)