By Sara Buchan
I’m subbing in for The Legend (as we like to call Howie around the office.). Mr. Berger’s seen a few training camps to know that medicals is a time for everyone to get back into the routine. Howie never gets ‘out’ of the routine.
But enough about him.
What’s routine at this time of year – every year – around the Leafs is expectation. The pressure never lets up for one moment and especially now for a team that’s looking to do something to show that back-to-back seasons of missing the playoffs were aberrations. GM John Ferguson jr. phrases it as “when we make the playoffs”, which to be truthful is something you’d expect.(Seriously what’s he supposed to say? “We’d really like to make the playoffs but if we’re say, top 9 that’s okay too.”??)
Right out of the gate, coach Paul Maurice is handling questions about line-ups. “I’ve got the line-ups done for the first four games, but we know that that will change after the first practices because you’ll start to get those minor injuries. In the first four, we’re not going to be looking at a lot of lines together that you might see in games. We’ll do it for a couple ,but we want to give some of the younger players that we probably won’t get an opportunity to see the rest of the year a chance to play with some better players to see what they can do at the NHL level.”
Maurice is also expecting to move along to implementing Phase Two (my capitalization) of his plan for the team. Last year was all about getting the team to practice and play at a higher pace as demanded by the changes in the game. This year, he’s looking for younger players to take the next step as well as a step forward in the team’s defensive game
“We’re comfortable with where our offensive game is: We think that with the additions that we’ve made and more importantly the base understanding of our forwards and our defensemen into how we want to play our offensive game that we will expect an improvement. Our team offensively was good enough to win the Stanley Cup – we scored as many goals as Anaheim: We’re in the top ten, we’d like to get into the top five and become an elite offensive team. The challenge will be — we have to be a good defensive hockey team without losing any of our offence and that’s the real challenge for us is to be able to implement a better defensive game without coming off the pedal and giving up goals to do it.”
Gauging by players’ responses to the traditional ‘medicals day’ questions, the team in certainly looking forward to taking that step. When you consider that no one plays his way into shape at training camp, there’s really not an ‘off season’ for players and the summer can seem like it breezed by in the blink of an eye. Not for players like Darcy Tucker though.
“I felt like it was a long, hard summer. I saw Brad May at his cottage this summer and (he said) ‘I just got off skates and I’m back on ‘em.’ And I’d really like to have that feeling next summer.”
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