Alright Marlies bandwagoners fans, their first home game of the season is tomorrow at 4. I'll be there, and I need ideas for a sign to take to the game. Remember, we have such notables on the team as:

Jiri "NSFW" Tlusty

Ryan "Boarding Major" Hollweg

Bates "Master" Battaglia

Justin "Meltdown in the Making" Pogge

On the Moose there's Jason "AHL Superstar" Krog and Cory "Will Never Start Over Luongo" Schneider.

So, any suggestions?

Editor's Note: Glove tap to koopa kid for tracking down this interview with Mikhail Grabovski. There are some hilarious answers as well as some very revealing ones about the current climate of the team.

I haven't seen this posted anywhere on here, forgive me if it has. Check out the broken translations. Hat tips go to Belarus from HFboards for the post and colonel_korn on SAS for the relay: 

Mikhail Grabovski: Maybe he got his license suspended?

- When during preseason you were able to finds the back of the net, but at the start of regular season you were in scoring drought from Minsk it looked like "eternal bad luck". Did you dwell on it?
- Absolutely no. There is nothing eternal in life and so is bad luck. I waited it out. When you're being trusted it's easier to deal with temporal difficulties. And they trust me in Toronto.

- Is this the biggest difference between Ron Wilson and Guy Charbonneau?
- No, there are others. Ron is more experienced than Guy, he has brought his team to the Stanley Cup final. Also, he has different approach towards players: in Montreal our relationships were strictly businesslike. Here in Toronto coach takes an interest in his players life besides hockey, can have heart-to-heart talk with you and it prepossesses you. Finally, what's also nice is that Wilson - proponent of euro style of hockey. I have no idea where it comes from, but being a North American he allows us to improvise more. Oh and I already said about the trust.

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Do I smell the occasion for a potential PPP meet and greet?

via www.torontomarlies.com

Justin Pogge, Mark Bell, Jeremy Williams, Ben Ondrus, plus a Wendel Clark bobblehead? Sign me up. Considering the Marl haven't topped 5K attendance in a season or so, we can't not get one.

The game is at 4, which leaves about enough time to find a bar and drink ourselves to death watching the Leafs play after the almost assured crushing loss by the Marlies. The Leafs will be playing the Blackhawks, so you know, the drinking will help.

This came up in one of the Montreal postgame threads, I figured I'd fanpost it because I have a sorta long response and those discussions have a tendency of dying, which would be a shame as this is a juicy topic.

Basically, Grabovski demanded a trade, and not just that, but a trade to a team that could find him ice time.Carbonneau had his pecking order down, a player like Grabovski was basically not on it.

Now, talent had one thing to do with it, it's hard to name a player in that top 6 that Grabs could supplant easily even now, but Grabovski is also certainly playing better for us than he ever did for the Habs. He's not dumb, he knows that he can't demand another trade without becoming a poisonous player to GMs, so instead he's working his tail off doing everything he needs to do to get ice time from Wilson. That includes backchecking, that includes forechecking, two areas that needed improvement when he was in Montreal.

Imagine you play for a storied franchise like Montreal (or, you know, the Leafs). The organization does it's best to impress upon it's players the honour and value of simply being a Canadien, it's special and it's a reward that comes from hard work and playing in the minors. Good teams often don't need talented rookies right away, Detroit is a great example with a stacked AHL team, so they need to convince their talent that the wait is worth it, else they all demand trades. Kind of like Grabovski. When he demanded a trade he gave the entire organization the finger, including every player in the NHL and the AHL pipeline.

Imagine Tlusty got fed up and demanded a trade. Would we as fans react well to that? Would the team? Grabosvki is probably more talented, and was given less of a shot in the bigs than good ol' Lusty.

Now imagine that the Leafs were not only nice enough to oblige Tlusty his request, but also traded him to a struggling divisional rival so he could have a shot. Now imagine he became their leading goal scorer.

I think we'd all be a little pissed off at the guy. 

In the spirit of avoiding summer boredom, here's my story on how I came to spend $150 of student money on a Leafs jersey:

As a Toronto native, it's hard to say exactly when it all started. When we went to my grandfather's on a Saturday the Leaf game was inevitably on, and the entire family would be present, though my grandfather, mother, and I may have been the only ones actually paying attention. This was at a young age though, I didn't know player names and barely knew how the game worked. I remember I went out to get a mini-stick to play out at recess, the shop was sold out of anything good so I grabbed a Tampa Bay Lightning stick, not really caring which team I got. Of course I was laughed at the next day.

My mom was a Jays fan first and foremost, but when the Leafs made the playoffs she watched intently, and loudly. Once again I'd watch, mostly because of the fact that it often extended my bed-time (once again, very young). I've got a better memory of those days. Later in life I'd go on to yell at the TV with her, I remember cursing Dominik Hasek for looking amazing, laughing at our inevitable defeats of the Sens, and the outrage at Gretzky.

Once I started going to high school hockey pretty much slipped to the backburner in my mind, I missed the heartbreak against the Hurricanes in '02, other things were keeping me busy and I'd only been a casual watcher growing up.

After my grandfather and mom died at the end of grade 12 and I went into university, a few of my old high school friends were watching games together (this would be 05-06) and invited me to come along. Being new in uni and lacking much to do, I started watching games with them. It had been a while, I barely recognized anybody or remembered the rules, but after a while I was heckling Jason Allison and Aki Berg with the best of them. I was really just watching hockey to get out of the house, but seeing it again reminded me of my mom and grandfather and gave me something to do

Once I moved out of the house in 06-07 I was without cable and most of the comforts of home. I'm obsessed with following numbers and generally going neurotic on a hobby, so I switched to watching the Leafs on CBC. What was casual viewing in 06 got pretty hardcore in 07, with the start of the 07-08 season marking me entering hockey pools, going to Leafs/Marlies games, buying jerseys, etc

That's it I guess, pretty unremarkable. While it could be said I've been a fan all my life, I don't really think of it that way, I just didn't follow the game the way real hockey fans did. So I'd say I've been a real fan for about 3 years and counting, and I picked a hell of a time to start watching again (they haven't made the playoffs since I started following the team closely).

I'd like to preface this by saying that I don't think McCabe is moving. He's been asked too many times and stated unequivocally that he's staying too many times to back down now. He seems like a dumb, proud guy and I think the media's putting his back to the wall with this decision.

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