Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The Leafs will go 41 seasons before they try this again



If it's any consolation, the other night the Tampa Bay Rays laid waste to the cliché, "reeeeeeling." Tonight, Leafs coach Ron Wilson killed "outside the box."

At Epic Carnival, there is, "Top 10 reasons why Toronto Maple Leafs coach Ron Wilson put Curtis Joseph in goal for the shootout."

Number 11 would be, "Has to be subtle about the Tank for Tavares until at least December."

5 comments:

Andrew Bucholtz said...

Loved the top-10 list. For #12, how about, "Putting in a cold goalie for the shootout worked so well in D2: The Mighty Ducks"? Of course, maybe that only works if the goalie is female...

Dennis Prouse said...

Joseph looked exactly like you would expect a cold goalie to look - slow and timid. I loved Pierre Maguire's complete 180, though - he went from praising the move one minute to subtly dissing it 60 seconds later, talking about Joseph's first shot of the game being Selanne on a breakaway. As the kids would say, "Duh!" My son is a goalie, and the absolute worst is when he has to go in cold, half way through a game, and get a breakaway as his first shot. You can often outsmart yourself as a coach, which is precisely what Wilson did here.

Navin Vaswani (@eyebleaf) said...

We're only 6 games into the season and I am already deathly sick of hearing "Tank for Tavares."

sager said...

That's why it was No. 11.

Is it too soon to start talking about "Tank for Taylor?"

Anonymous said...

Putting a 41 year old goaltender into a shootout after sitting on the bench for the better part of 3 hours is dumb for another obvious reason...risk of injury.
Cujo could have easily pulled or even tore his groin making the splits on a save.
Fortunately for him his reflexes were too slow for that.
Wilson had better come up with a better idea the next time because a trapping, offensively challenged team like the Leafs will will be participating in a fair number of shootouts this year, if they're lucky enough to get to OT, that is.