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Leaf Rumours

PlayerToBeNamedLater said:
Yup, they got the name wrong. They're talking about the Buffalo kid.

Overall though, ESPN's website does a very job of providing quality stats and info. Much better than TSN's or Sportsnet's websites which I never go to for anything hockey related.

For stats, it's either NHL.com or ESPN.com for me.
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Quoted For Truth. ESPN's website is one of the best.

And yeah, really no interest in Tim Kennedy at this point.
 
hockeylover said:
mirtle

Leafs GM Brian Burke says there has been some progress on a deal for Christian Hanson. He believes he will be signed before training camp.

Oh, and yeah, I'd agree about JFJ, it's really the Raycroft/Toskala crap that ruined his rep completely. But those were just doozies.
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What possible bargaining power does Christian ****ing Hanson have at this point??
 
PlayerToBeNamedLater said:
If JFJ didn't **** up the goaltending so badly, his tenure would've been looked upon completely different. The forward/defense groups he built were good enough to at least make the playoffs imo.

But he did **** up the goaltending badly, so he gets no sympathy from my end.
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You're right. We could have kept Rask and signed Gerber or Manny Legace that first year, and avoided the entire Raycrap/Toskaloss era and the picks and who knows where would be today. That alone gets JFJ booted to the curb permanently.
 
Don't make me smack you with my ring hand...

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG5agYAs0qk"]YouTube- Family Guy- Gregory Peck's Kids[/ame]
 
PlayerToBeNamedLater said:
If JFJ didn't **** up the goaltending so badly, his tenure would've been looked upon completely different. The forward/defense groups he built were good enough to at least make the playoffs imo.

But he did **** up the goaltending badly, so he gets no sympathy from my end.
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but the thing is that he didn't build ANYTHING.

as bad as his goaltending decisions were -- and make no mistake, they were by far his worst -- in five years as the team's general manager he did absolutely NOTHING that impacted the club's long-term future (outside of hurting it with the toskala/raycroft trades).

he didn't build a team, he just kept all the guys he inherited from quinn. within burke's first 15 months as general manager he made two moves that would have been, by a country mile, the two biggest moves of ferguson's entire tenure with the team.

he was too risk-averse to be an effective general manager. you need to be able to make tough decisions and while i think he did a good job at the negotiating table with players he suffered from cold feet when dealing with other gm's.

and you can't build a winning team like that.
 
It's weird because he had no problem giving up Rask for Raycroft but including Steen in the deal was the reason he never traded for Pronger.

I think as much as some people hate the Kessel deal, it was ballsy and he got the evaluation of the player he acquired right. JFJ gave up too much AND got the evaluation of the players wrong with both Raycroft and Toskala.

And I'd say his best moves in his entire tenure were 1) re-signing Kaberle at only 4.25, 2) hanging on to Antropov 3) Dom Moore for nothing. Mbow's right, the only stamps he made on this franchise were negative. He never brought in anyone nearly as talented (and young) as Kessel and Phaneuf and Burke's only had a year and a half.
 
JFJ made some horrible moves, but I'll always see his tenure through the lense of MLSE and president of hockey operations, Richard Peddie.

Cutting a 60+mil salary budget in half was bad enough, but thinking that he could keep the play-off revenues rolling is why the Leafs never had a decent chance to rebuild until last season.

F*CK.
 
JFJ made some horrible moves, but I'll always see his tenure through the lense of MLSE and president of hockey operations, Richard Peddie.

Cutting a 60+mil salary budget in half was bad enough, but thinking that he could keep the play-off revenues rolling is why the Leafs never had a decent chance to rebuild until last season.
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I hate Peddie as much as anyone but sorry, I can't blame Peddie for the Raycroft/Toskala deals. He got the evaluation of both players wrong. They didn't help us in the future OR the present.

It's not like JFJ gave away all our picks/prospects for a good, older player who helped us make the playoffs all his years here and we're left with the aftermath... he failed at the "now" too.
 
but everybody has certain objectives to reach and parameters within which they have to reach those objectives in pretty much every job. i'm not saying that jfj was dealt an ideal hand -- with the presence of quinn and not being able to hire his own coach off the bat, the tripartite power struggle between peddie, quinn and dryden that he walked into and, yes, the narrow objective given to him by peddie he didn't necessarily have it easy.

but still, we have to judge him based on the decisions he made given those variables. and the bottom line is that the decisions he made were still poor. whether it was allotting money to kubina and gill at the back end instead of up front, signing blake to a $4mn per year deal, trading for raycroft and then toskala, hiring maurice as coach, or trying to stick with a core of players that couldn't get it done with a far superior supporting cast (kaberle/sundin/mccabe/tucker with roberts/mogilny/nieuwendyk/leetch/nolan/belfour vs. whatever mediocre crap they've trotted out since the lockout), he proved himself to be a very poor general manager.

sure, he didn't get carte blanche like burke, but just because the situation he stepped into was less than ideal does not mean we cannot pass fair judgments on the decisions he made while at the helm of the franchise.
 
hockeylover said:
I hate Peddie as much as anyone but sorry, I can't blame Peddie for the Raycroft/Toskala deals. He got the evaluation of both players wrong. They didn't help us in the future OR the present.

It's not like JFJ gave away all our picks/prospects for a good, older player who helped us make the playoffs all his years here and we're left with the aftermath... he failed at the "now" too.
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precisely. that he was instructed to make the playoffs doesn't really matter. the decisions he made to get the team into the playoffs were obviously poor ones.

and based on the bad decisions he made -- why the hell would anybody have even wanted him to blow things up and try and rebuild? every indication suggests that he would have done a poor job at that. he was a mess at the trade table. he couldn't engineer a trade that tilted in the leafs favour to save his life.

for the purpose of building an example, let's pretend that peddie was even more hands on than he actually was, and instead of just saying 'build a playoff team,' said 'we need to get a better goalie.' ferguson's only option for improving the team in net wasn't to trade for raycroft or toskala. it's not like he was told to trade rask for a goalie. he decided to do that. and it's not like he was told to trade for raycroft. he decided to do that. he could have just as easily traded for vokoun or luongo, or plucked bryzgalov off waivers, or traded for biron (and so on and so forth).
 
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Burke's under the same orders as JFJ. Peddie flat-out said the team is expected to make the playoffs this season. He's just a far superior and more experienced GM than Junior was.
 
msun30 said:
for the purpose of building an example, let's pretend that peddie was even more hands on than he actually was, and instead of just saying 'build a playoff team,' said 'we need to get a better goalie.' ferguson's only option for improving the team in net wasn't to trade for raycroft or toskala. it's not like he was told to trade rask for a goalie. he decided to do that. and it's not like he was told to trade for raycroft. he decided to do that. he could have just as easily traded for vokoun or luongo, or plucked bryzgalov off waivers, or traded for biron (and so on and so forth).
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Revisionist theories.

There is no 100% guarantee that Vokoun, Luongo or Bryz could have ever ended up as Leafs property for a laundry list of reasons.

JFJ overpaid in every goalie move he made from Belfour's extension to the Toskala trade - but his intentions were always clear. He never wanted to be left with the empty goaltending chair when the music stopped.

It was an insecurity that cost us dearly.
 
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