Bizarro Leafs: Toronto 7 - Buffalo 4

MF37's comment about the kid gloves with which Ron Wilson's squad was handled after his first game opened the door to something that might be a regular feature - A look at how the Leafs' actions might have been received if JFJ and Maurice had not been (rightly) canned. Let's see how this one goes...

The Leafs were finally back in action last night after a long summer of making some questionable moves including buying out the team's second most popular player after an injury plagued season, failing to convince the team's talisman to return (and really, shouldn't that have been a slam dunk?), shelling out ridiculous sums of cash in the hope that a guy that has played 94 NHL games will someday be worth $3.5M a year, all the while getting rid of one of the defence's cornerstones in exchange for an oft-injured spare piece from the Panthers. Oh, and to top it all off, he managed to further deplete the Leafs' stable of draft picks in the hockey equivalent of throwing good money after bad.

What's the old saying? The more things change the more they remain the same? Paul Maurice's club, despite having a summer of reflection and two full days of practice, picked up exactly where they left off last year. From the opening face-off they managed to marry their usual lack of preparation with an apparent continued lack of undertanding of the level of enforcement that the referees will show this year. End result: down 1-0 after 45 seconds.

Last year the early goal would have signalled an ensuing collapse but the Leafs managed to hold things together for almost two more periods as they built a 4-1 lead. Of course, any seasoned observer knew what to expect: a parade to the penalty box and a pair of powerplay goals against to shorten the lead to 6-4 with just a few minutes left in the game.

Now this would be the perfect time to practice calling timeouts before coughing up a late lead against the Sabres. I mean, it's not like it has happened before against the Sabres. Luckily for Maurice, his continued aversion to using timeouts to calm down his troops did not come back to haunt him as Jiri Tlusty potted an empty netter after blocking a shot.

Overall, the Leafs did have some good stretches of pressing hockey but it's nothing that we have not seen before from these guys. They usually tended to revert to form soon enough and this resulted in some long shifts pinned in their own zone running around chasing the puck. So much for the promised revolution. The back up goaltending looks about as solid as it was last year. In other words, Jell-o soft.

So game one is in the books and all we can say is that while the result is a nice change the path there seemed familiar. Well, at least the faces are new. Onward!