Follow Colin on Twitter! Follow @ColinDJD
I once had this friend who would promise me the stars and always come up short. He would be ever so apologetic and offer sincere ways of making things up to me, despite never following through with his promises.
After hearing how great things would be if I obliged, I often found myself giving him the benefit of the doubt because what was being offered sounded reasonable even though I could see that his challenge was tough.
I went through years of this and would write a few too many cheques to support his cause, until I eventually started feeling bad for the guy, told him he was cut off, and observed from the distance as he suckered others in.
Any of the above seem a little too familiar to any of you? The Toronto Maple Leafs have been a friend of mine since the day I watched them as a three year old child on TV with my old man. I have yet to see a whole lot of success in my time following this group and when it comes to writing about them, it offers some challenges…especially around this time of the year.
With all that being said, I’ve been scouring the twitter and reading articles about where the Leafs stand on what the fans and media alike have to offer, and have been somewhat disappointed. For a few years now the main issue with the Toronto Maple Leafs has been defense. Their defensive players, systems, and stats haven’t been good and despite making many personnel changes, they still…well…aren’t great.
The reason I mentioned that I’ve been upset with much of what I’ve been hearing and reading about the last string of games is due to the fact that this team has seemingly made significant strides toward improving their defensive game and actually…wait for it…playing a recognizable system! Crazy, I know.
I don’t often put down “analysts… in my blogs as much of the time I write opinion based material, but the other night I was listening to the rambling of Kypreos during intermissions and was quite surprised with his comments. I can recall a few too many times where Kypreos has complained about how poorly the Leafs have been defensively and that they won’t go anywhere playing the way they do (40+ shots etc), and after improving in said respect by some impressive margins under Horachek, I wholeheartedly expected him to be excited and offer some sort of insightful comments on their play.
In fact, we all received the complete opposite, almost to the point where it almost seemed as though he’s just so used to complaining about this team that he couldn’t offer anything else but criticism for their “boring… play. And this is exactly what I was getting from many fans.
Have we all become so accustomed to the Leafs ultimately failing that when they drastically improve upon an area which in all accounts is critical to success in the NHL, we still complain? Listen folks, defensively this team was a disaster. The only reason they got through most of their wins was from an offensive minded system that would try and blanket their defensive woes. The idea here was basically, score as often as you can and try to outscore the other guys. Might as well just have a shootout, frankly.
What Horachek is doing with this group can very likely be considered as boring, but could we perhaps give this group a few weeks to work through a defensive minded system and see how things go before we assume that nothing will change as per the norm?
I can confidently say that the last two games has been the most defense I can recall this team playing in quite some time and I don’t want anyone else telling me that they won’t score any goals playing like that; they are likely bitter that the team is still losing and it’s much easier to complain about this team lately than it is to see any silver lining, but if any fan wants to see this team succeed beyond streaky wins and find consistency, they’ll need to give this defense thing a chance.
It’s going to continue to be painful, and I don’t expect a whole ton of goals to be scored. But as the team learns to play a better team game, develop more structure and cohesion, their confidence should start to improve again and goals will follow.
Defense wins championships, and the Leafs have only defended their lackluster play to date, let’s now allow them to change the way they think the game and perhaps find some consistency.
And one last thing; the grilling toward Kessel needs to stop. We all know he's not perfect and we all know what he can stand to improve upon, but he's at an elite level in terms of what he was brought in to do and I would offer that as the team improves defensively, so should a few certain players.
Thanks for reading.