Full of tryptophan and a fire in my belly that's 50% yesterday's game, and 50% the 1 and a half Guiness, turkey, stuffing, gherkins, shrimp cocktail, cranberry sauce, buttertarts, salad, cocktail sauce, mashed potato, cocktail onions, sour cream, Pepsi, buns, butter, yams, banana bread, peas, carrots, coffee, turnips, pumpkin pie, a mouthful of red wine and something called a "goofball" that was made with marshmallow's and rice crispies also renting space in my guts. Not to mention I also really enjoyed employing gravy as beverage.
What I want to talk about is the 5o% not associated with food.
As I stated in my excellent post yesterday (add link here) the game against the Blues would be a very telling one, and in many ways it was.
What really upset that 50% of my tummy-tums that isn't food related is and was the shoot-out. I like Ron Wilson and think he is absolutely the right man for the job, but his Pick 3 didn't make sense to me. Kulemin I did understand, and he scored. But Antropov, who I thought stopped playing the moment the Leafs went up 3 to nothing, went in slower than Jason Allison on an ether binge. And Kubina? Oh, I get it, you wanted to confuse Legace by pulling the 'ol Crawford move by putting in the wrong guy, right? Right?
Right.
If CBC were to cut to the bench after Kubina's- for lack of a better word, move- I'm sure we would have seen a dejected Niklas Hagman a'la Gretzky, hanging his head.
Not that it needs to be said, but let me just state for the record that when you are dealing with Norte, you are dealing with a m-a-n.I eat my aspirin without water and I have never played touch football in my life. I love hockey and without sounding like the president of the Brian Orser fan club - I like it played hard.
I would rate our team toughness as above the Flying Fathers but below the Lizzies from the movie The Warriors. To say that we are in dire need of toughness would require me to look up the word dire so lets just say we're desperate for some team toughness immediately.
My favourite players are those who play hard (*sniff* Darcy) but not dirty. It may be a fine line but what Hollweg did was not, as Fletcher said, "marginal". And certainly not "debatable", as Wilson queried. It was, and I don't care that the kid saw him coming and turned his head, dirty. This is Steve Downie stuff, Gary Suter stuff. It's a fatty Mc-Bertuzzi burger with a side of super-sized Avery (and not that sort of good offensive side either) and quite frankly, I hate to see it in a Leafs uniform. (What I haven't heard mentioned and can only hope doesn't happen, is that as this is the 2nd hit from behind on a St Louis Blue (the latest being their own 18 year old wunder-kind, Alex Pietrangelo) and the next time the Leafs play them won't be a head hunting mission.)
Hollweg gets the 2 and a game and just like the TV show M*A*S*H, this major was a bitch. With goals 48 seconds apart from Keith "I still wont take you in the pool" Tkachuk and Patrik Berglund, and it was the start, for me, of what repeat LSD users call "gut-rot".
Saying that - do I believe there should be some internal punishment? Absolutely. Ron Wilson said he would hold players accountable, so we'll see. But do I blame Hollweg for the game and the loss of the point? No. This is an hour long game and not 20 minutes. The Toronto Maple Leafs let the Blues back - all of them, Hollweg included.
