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Tweet, tweet, tweet-every skate blade put wrong, every second taken off, every hint that someone’s injured. Yesterday, they were practicing in El Segundo, at the LA Kings’ facility, probably about as far from the traditional center of the hockey world as you might find yourself, and still, the coverage in the media was unrelenting. The thing is, the Leafs can’t escape the scrutiny of their fans. Coaching? They’ve had some of the best, men who have been successful elsewhere. If it’s not ownership, maybe it’s something else.
![why radio silence works why radio silence works](https://live.staticflickr.com/3034/3267173292_9a0a700b30_b.jpg)
Why is that, and why can’t they fulfill the hopes that they’ll finally win again? So what’s up with the team, and why the drought? This is an especially pressing question to the degree that they carry a mantle for the country. Then there’s Brian Burke, famous for truculence, but also highly effective, at least until his ideas, which worked to bring the Ducks a Cup in 2007, got stale without his realizing that they had. Yet it can’t be true that Leafs’ management is made up of horrid people, because some of the people who have been in the Toronto front office in the past couple of decades include Ken Dryden and John Ferguson, Jr. And this fellow was a marquis name and won a few Cups. To this day, the former player I’m referencing has nothing good to say about Imlach. They just got a larger diamond placed in the old one. It was he, for example, who was responsible for the fact that the players, when they won a second Stanley Cup during their tenure with the Leafs, didn’t get a new ring. The one person I know who played under his reign tells me that he was a miserable, cheap bugger. The GM during the late 1950s, most of the 1960s, and the bridge between the 1970s and 80s was Punch Imlach. Those were the days when the Leafs won the Cup on average every handful of years.
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Maybe that makes him too gung-ho, but he had a lot of success, too. There’s a story about him and his demands of players to sacrifice their careers to participate in WW2, and I tell it in my book My Country Is Hockey. Another time, he tried to get Neilson to wear a paper bag on his head during a game.įrom the 1920s-50s, Conn Smythe was the GM. Just one incident as example: he fired Roger Neilson one day, then rehired him the same day. Ballard, as most longtime fans of the game know, was famously a bad man. Management going back to the days of owner Harold Ballard has been horrible.
![why radio silence works why radio silence works](https://radiosilenceapp.com/img/radiosilence/network-monitor.png)
What I don’t get is why the Toronto Maple Leafs have been so bad for so long, or why it sometimes seems like all the pressure to bring the Stanley Cup back to Canada rests on them.īut here are a couple of theories. One is right here in front of me as I write-the LA Kings, who have 16 players of the 26 listed on the roster and IR hailing from Canada). I get that neither Montreal nor any other Canadian club has won the Stanley Cup for two decades (if by Canadian we mean teams resident there-there are lots of “Canadian” NHL teams which happen to play in the US. With the Leafs in town to take on the Kings Monday (and the Ducks Wednesday), it seems like a good time to ask that pressing question: What’s up with the Toronto franchise, which again seems like it’s mired in the muck as another coach has departed and the performance, somewhat hopeful in the first half, is flagging? And why the feeling that this is a huge, yeah verily almost national, tragedy?