(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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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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