Weekly Takes - Monday, February 21 Edition

Weekly Takes - Monday, February 21 Edition

1. My three stars from the Maple Leafs 4-1 win over the Penguins on Thursday…

1. Auston Matthews

2. Morgan Reilly

3. Jack Campbell

2. My three stars from the Leafs 6-3 loss to the Blues on Saturday…

1. Alexander Kerfoot

2. William Nylander

3. Wayne Simmonds

I thought they played fine offensively but Campbell was nowhere near good enough in net and their play in the neutral zone was one of their worst games of the season.

3. I love the Nick Ritchie for Ilya Lyubushkin and Ryan Dzingel trade for the Leafs.

Purely looking ahead to next season, Kyle Dubas takes on two players who are not under contract while shipping out Ritchie’s $2,500,000 in its entirety.

Doing so without retaining any salary and/or attaching a sweetener is some tidy and important business.

And looking at it from this season’s perspective, Ritchie was simply not going to be a part of this team, while Lyubushkin addresses an important need.

I have been calling for a top-four, puck-moving defenceman to play with Jake Muzzin (I still am) but it was also becoming clear that they needed to find a physical, stay-at-home defenceman to play on the third-pairing with Rasmus Sandin, who can handle the puck-moving duties on that pairing. Lyubushkin is exactly that.

He gives the Leafs an element on the back-end that they did not have outside of Muzzin.

Getting Dzingel, a strong defensive forward with playoff experience is not a bad addition either, if he clears waivers, which I doubt. I would not have him in the lineup over any of the 12 current forwards but he provides some depth.

4. The reality is, Dubas cannot be done rebuilding this defence, which has underperformed this season.

Morgan Reilly - T.J. Brodie is a great first pairing, and Sandin-Lyubushkin is a great third pairing, but as I wrote above, the Leafs still need a defencemen to pair with Muzzin.

Timothy Liljegren can be the seventh D-Man on the team, while one of Travis Dermott/Justin Holl can be the eighth. One of them has to go. (Ideally Holl, because Dermott is important depth on the left side.)

5. Simply put, Canada’s Men’s Olympic Hockey Team was poorly built right from the get-go.

With all due respect to the Ben Street’s, Landon Ferraro’s, and Alex Grant’s of the world, they should not have been on the team over the likes of Connor Bedard, Jake Neighbours, and Kaiden Ghule.

There is no guarantee that the NHL will ever return to the Olympics, more so if the NHL and NHLPA form a World Cup, so Hockey Canada truly has to take a step back and determine what kind of team they want to take the Olympics moving forward.

Because the squads they have sent to the last two Olympics are not good enough.

6. Team Canada on the Women’s side, though, cemented themselves as the greatest women’s hockey team to ever be assembled with their Gold Medal win over the Americans on Wednesday.

After they won Gold at the World Championships back in August, I wrote how the next Golden Era of Canadian Women’s Hockey was officially underway after falling behind the U.S. program for the better part of the last decade and that is indeed the case.

Outside of Rebecca Johnston and Jocelyne Larocque, the entire team from this year’s squad has the chance to return in 2024.

Yes, Marie-Philip Poulin will be 34, as will Natalie Spooner, but Sarah Fillier, Sarah Nurse, Renata Fast, and Clarie Thompson will be the big “core four” and that is a pretty big issue if you are the rest of the hockey world.

7. Full credit to the Steelers for hiring Brian Flores, something likely no other team was going to do.

His hiring is a home run hire for a franchise that has not had an assistant of this calibre in quite some time.

A badly-needed addition.

8. With Toronto FC’s season beginning Saturday, it is hard to see their lineup being good enough to make the playoffs, even when Lorenzo Insigne shows up in August.

It is not impossible to envision, as the Deandre Kerr’s, Jahkeele Marshall-Rutty’s, and Jayden Nelson’s of the world could breakout, while the Alejandro Pozuelo’s of the world could rebound, but I think the reality is, this transition is going to take time.

I think the expectations should take off for this team in the spring of 2023 for the CONCACAF Champions League.

Win the Canadian Championship this year and by the time the Champions League begins next spring, the expectation should be that this team can compete with the best teams in CONCACAF.

That is the standard that this team is heading towards.