Mailbag: What To Do With The Leafs Defence And Some Horror Movies I Did Not Watch – Pension Plan Puppets

Here is a mailbag. In it are questions, and also answers.

The first thing is to stop tripping over themselves. The league routinely makes what look like unforced errorsfor example, the outdoor game in Saskatchewan that seemingly no one knew about until it happened. Part of that is their own fault from going to the well way too often on outdoor games, but still.

After that, the league does have a tough jobhockey is still played less than other major sports throughout most of the U.S., in some places a lot less. I actually think the league has done a few things right recently (3v3 overtime, the Vegas Golden Knights expansion) and theyre correct to make changes to keep increasing pace of play. Hockeys best selling point is that its faster than any other major sport in North America; bogging down with unnecessary whistles and tedious reviews hampers that strength. I would be interested to see a move away from video review, pretty much entirely, and to look at finding solutions to try and lessen offsides.

Id love for the league to market a bit more on team personality than player personality. Most NHLers are still publicly anodyne cliche machines and that seems hard to fix in the short term; the only people who really seem excited about individuals in the NHL are the Twitter thirst community that likes players with faces like rodents. So maybe a better way to go about it is to lean into the team identity thing thats so often talked about. I dont think the differences between teams are actually that pronounced in most cases, and a lot of them are running fairly similar systems (sorry), but helping give people an idea of what theyll see from a given team would be useful.

Also, just go to the fucking Olympics, you clowns.

This is really hard to say.

As my colleague Arvind likes to point out, basically two things get you paid as a defenceman: time on ice and points. Travis Dermott has neither in much quantity at the moment. As an RFA, it should be possible to get him quite cheaply on a two-or-three year, or there can be a one-year show me deal if thats the players preference. (Its probably not ours, but Dermott can always pick up his qualifying offer, as Andreas Johnsson did.) If you could get Dermott in the low $2M range on a three-year, I would take that, otherwise I am content to wait and see.

Mikheyev is tough to guess. I think his point production is going to keep cooling off a bit to the point where by the end of the year its quite reasonable to keep him under $3M for a couple of years. Right now he might cost a bit more so hes another case to wait and seeremember hes an RFA too, albeit one with an obvious KHL option in his back pocket. Until teams start issuing mid-level offer sheets (which, in my opinion, they should), its not too hard to get value on these.

Justin Holl is the wild one. His points are still pretty moderate but his ice time is creeping up, and unlike Cody Ceci (bad) and Tyson Barrie (about to be super overpaid) he seems plausible enough for the Leafs to keep. Hes also about to be unrestricted.

The most comparable recent player to Holl that I can remember, a top-four minutes but low-scoring RHD who only became an everyday player at age 27, is Greg Pateryn. (Holl will get more points than Pateryn did with Dallas, so its not perfect, but bear with me.) Pateryn signed for three years at $2.25M with Minnesota in July 2018. You might also compare Nick Jensen, who fits a similar mold and took four years at $2.5M with Washington immediately after a trade in February. I figure were talking in the mid-twos on a three-year for Holl right now.

An eight-year deal for Holl at that $1.25M is a interesting in theorythe Leafs would presumably load up bonuses for him to the extent possibleand as you note the risk at the back end is primarily to MLSEs ample funds and the loss of an SPC slot. I dont like the odds of Holl being an NHL contributor in the back half of that deal at all, and there are some potential accumulated consequences if we do this kind of thing repeatedly. But right now its just Justin were discussing, so okay.

I think, though, Holl doesnt really need to take it. If he gets the Jensen deal its the same overall amount of money, sooner, and most players believe theyll still be players for a long time, so I doubt Holl would expect it to be his last deal. They also tend not to bet against themselves, which this would be doingalmost the only time Ive seen players take those kind of cheap-but-long deals when they could have gotten more is with a couple of Nashvilles depth forwards who were RFAs at the time. If Holl turns out to be the teams best RHD next year, which is pathetic but not impossible, hes gonna feel kind of silly having committed the entire rest of his earning career at $1.25M per. Maybe hes the type to take it. But I doubt it.

I can think of two issues both teams have in common:

I have no idea how much #2 matters, if at all, but #1 is a lot for teams that rely on good goaltending. Tampa doesnt have Torontos issue of being a scoring team that got bad at scoring for a while, though, and theyre better overall.

I dont think so. If you think pretty much anyone with a pulse could play well with Matthews and Nylander maybe you rate him lower, but hes been effective and productive on a successful first line, and hes also on a deal that bought UFA years. Understandably hes talked about a lot as a potential trade chip because were so deep at wing but by no means do I want to unload him just for the sake of not paying him.

If the team falls out of competitiveness, you have a sale of rentals and possibly someone like Johnsson/Kapanen for short-term future wins. If they hang around I honestly dont think Dubas will do more than maybe pick up a backup goalie as cheaply as he can manage.

The Buds are intermittent. I hope they will be all day again soon.

Im good, thank you. I hate Christmas carols, though.

[shot of me having somehow died trying to slingshot the rock before the Minotaur arrives]

Beyond gestures like the concussion spotters? They dont want to expose themselves to liability, they dont think the game can actually significantly reduce CTE without changes that will ruin the product, and they dont want to scare people off. There are a lot of reasons why traditional boxing has declined in the United States, but one was that people thought an awful lot about what happened to all those boxers. (The same is going to happen to UFC fighters over time.)

The fall of the blue leaves is precisely correlated with my transition from hockey season to ignoring baseball season.

I think youre always justified in turning on bad management even if you dont have a ludicrous double-city franchise waiting for you. Fans refusing to go along is one of the pressures on management to not half-ass things, you might as well exert it to make the Blue Jay Brains somewhat spikier.

Did you know there are twelve of these fucking movies? Jesus. I have seen none of them and I refuse to do so. But I am nonetheless committed to answering these questions, so here we go, based on random crap I found while scanning Wikipedia:

1. Jason X they went full sci fi on it and I respect that. He goes to space and they just named him Uber Jason, because why not?

2. Friday the 13th Part III this is a hell of a sequence:

Back at Higgins Haven, Shelly scares Vera with a hockey mask and then wanders into the barn, where Jason slashes his throat. Taking his mask to conceal his face, Jason proceeds to murder the rest of the group. Vera retrieves Shellys wallet from under the dock and is shot in the eye with a speargun. Jason enters the house and bisects a hand-standing Andy with a machete. Debbie finishes her shower and rests on a hammock, where Jason thrusts a knife through her chest from beneath, killing her. When the power goes out in the house, Chuck goes downstairs to the basement only for Jason to hurl him into the fuse box, electrocuting him. Chili finds that everyone else is dead and is then impaled with a hot fire poker.

3. Friday the 13th Part II someone runs away in a burlap sack

4. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning I am deeply amused that pretty much everyone involved in this one agrees it was absolute garbage:

Actor Dick Wieand stated that It wasnt until I saw Part V that I realized what a piece of trash it was. I mean, I knew the series reputation, but youre always hoping that yours is going to come out better, and director Danny Steinmann stated that he shot a fucking porno in the woods there. You wouldnt believe the nudity they cut out.

5. Friday the 13th (1980) Its the first one so its probably better than the rest of them? Dont tell me if Im wrong.

6. Friday the 13th (2009) Its the late 2000s so now we have to do an origin story. Why wouldnt we? What if someone loses touch with the narrative base of this endless franchise about a guy who murders camp counsellors?

7. Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday Fulemin Goes To Hell: Making This List

8. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan if you call it this and you dont put First We Take Manhattan by Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack, you immediately get bumped down. Bonus points for the setting change though.

9. Freddy vs. Jason get out of here with this shared universe shit. Im tired of it. No more cinematic universes for ten years until we figure out whats going on.

10. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood at this point there is simply no excuse for anyone to be going to this lake

11. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives they resurrect him with a thunderbolt. Are you guys even fucking trying?

12. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter when you call something The Final Chapter and then make eight more movies you should go to jail

Itll still be bad performance. Remember, thats what got Babcock canned, all the other stuff only became public afterwards and the team was aware of the Marner stuff before. Hynes (New Jersey) and DeBoer (San Jose) were apparently fine enough guys who were just failing at their jobs, and while no one will quite tell us what got Jim Montgomery booted from Dallas, the general drift of the reporter hints is seemingly in another direction. At least at the NHL level, Bill Peters in Calgary and possibly Marc Crawford as an AC in Chicago (investigation pending) are the only ones in the abuse/racism category.

Its hard to know! Id love to get Alexander Georgiev but I dont think NYR has any need to deal him, despite having a nice AHL prospect waiting. Beyond that its a complete wasteland. I would trade Ceci for Ryan Miller and might slightly sweeten the pot to do it, but I dont think Anaheim would and the salary thing is a mess on it anyway. After that its fringe guys. Being capped out to the absolute hilt really has a way of wrecking your goalie plans. So: my honest guess is that if the Leafs are still contending in a month or two Dubas will spend a fifth on a decent AHL goalie.

With hindsight they should have kept Curtis McElhinney and not Garret Sparks, that seems clear. I still think that was a credible move at the time, though. More recently they needed another insurance policy behind Hutchinson and Michal Neuvirth, who after all has been injured a lot. I liked the idea of trying him but we ate a lot of risk there; our Plan A was flimsy, our B was flimsy, and there wasnt a Plan C.

Re the defence: try to go cheap on Dermott and Holl if you can now, if you cant, oh well. Realistically I probably re-sign Jake Muzzin if I can do it without totally eating dirt on the back half of the deal; alternatively, Id be looking at trades (see my answer to THII later on.) Barrie I neither want at his likely price nor can keep. Sandin and Liljegren are supposed to be your third pair, but depth guys should be in the mix for the sixth spot. Oh, and look hard at Alex Pietrangelo in the offseason, but thats a bit of a pipe dream.

As mentioned above, Georgiev would be neat. But barring us getting a mint prospect I dont think the Leafs have much choice but to gulp and re-sign Freddie. There are simply not enough good starting goalies in the NHL who are as consistent as him and we cant waste time on Tavares and our other stars. Deals for goalies into their 30s are scary, but so are wasted primes with no real starter at all.

Jake Muzzin, for sure. He seems to be dropping back away in favour of Tyson Barrie and Morgan Riellythey were ahead of him before, but not by much, and Muzzin is dropping. I am wondering if hes injured, or if to some extent the adjustment to the system is hard for him, because hes our best defensive defenceman. My eyes have wondered if hes got a nagging injury a couple of times. He seems to be doing well enough in the minutes hes still getting, thoughhis number under Keefe are terrific.

Depends who isnt wearing them.

Is this a Sixth Sense thing? Am I dead? Was it someone mad about Josh Leivo who got me?

Trade speculation is a mugs game at the best of times just because its such a specific market with limited supply and a few specific personalities. Speaking generally if you can get a defenceman who is or would soon be plausible at RD on a second pairing, you probably give that a look. Or a star goalie prospect.

[wordless screaming]

The Leafs d-zone focus on keeping shots to the outside is a little reminiscent of what the idea with Carlyle was, although the Leafs of that era also were even worse defensively than this gang of glass cannons. I do think these Leafs recover from opposing shots against better than the Carlyle ones did, which helps cut back on those long cycles against. But Toronto has given up a lot of shots since forever it feels like. What changes is at the offensive end...

...and thats where I see a difference. Randy Carlyles teams cheated high for rush chances and that was basically the extent of the strategy. Sustaining possession would have seemed to Carlyle strange and maybe sacrilegious. Keefes teams have a different front end on them. I am hoping the back end works better than it did under RC.

There is a joke here about which hand you use for the computer mouse, but Im too classy to make it. Am I? Ah, shit, I did.

Anyway, probably not? Unless your left arm has gone in the direction of Popeye the Sailor Man. Then get that checked.

I think almost everyones perception of how good this team is has lowered at least a bit in the last three months. The team simply played worse than we would have expected, and even if you blame Babcock for a lot of that, those were two of the worst months of his tenure. Something went wrong for this team.

Can we still believe theyre better than their record? I think so. I do. Under Keefe they still seem like a better team to me. If they get back to at least outscoring their problems sometimes theyll look more like we expected and we wont seem to have been so far off.

To be honest, no. He seems like a nice guy but I dont buy that hes very good. Whether he deserves it more than Hutchinson is I guess debatable but neither of them ought to be starting an NHL game in the macro sense.

Its odd, because there have to have been moreI was watching the Leafs practically from the time I could walk and I was more than old enough to get foolishly invested in free agentsbut the earliest one I remember clearly was Brooks Laich as he approached free agency, of all people, and I was in my twenties by that point (2011). I just generally accepted throughout my youth that we signed very old free agents and then traded for deadline rentals, and that was that.

I hate to duck but the optimum Leafs post-TDL roster is composed of players that are already here plus a backup goalie. Assuming we got that for a draft pick, my lines would be something like:

Johnsson - Matthews - Nylander

Hyman - Tavares - Marner

Mikheyev - Kerfoot - Kapanen

Engvall - Spezza - Moore

Rielly - Barrie

Muzzin - Holl

Dermott- Ceci

Andersen

Middling Backup X

Simply, put, its hard for the Leafs to make legit acquisitions with their cap situation. Maybe Cody Ceci has a lot of value around the league still, but I really doubt it. I did speculate on one trade idea later on but I dont think its especially likely. At the same time, Im not sure theres actually much use in bringing up Rasmus Sandin and throwing him into the fire on the third pair right now.

Speaking of the World Juniors, obviously if the Leafs let Sandin play for Sweden, hes the big name to watch. Nick Robertson should make Team USA, I would think. After that its just a question of whether Mikko Kokkonen makes Finland. The Leafs dont have anyone else there.

I follow them primarily through our other writers on this site, but amongst the Marlies and the Growlers, Im going to have to go for the obvious choice. I think Rasmus Sandin is a lock to be a full-time NHLer and I think Timothy Liljegren is more likely than not to be, and thats basically what there is to be excited about. Yegor Korshkov, Mason Marchment and Adam Brooks might be Fun Depth Guys in a year if they can stay healthy, and Joseph Woll might be good one day, but our pro tiers are pretty thin right now. If you havent heard of a guy on the AHL squad now, its probably for good reason.

Also, I hate to be a cynic and I know Kyle Dubas is trying to change the system, but there are extremely few significant NHL skaters who played any extended time in the ECHL. The now-retired Alex Burrows is the only recent one I can think of off the top of my head.

Somewhat boringly, yeah, I see it staying the same. My basic reasons for thinking so are: Cody Ceci is hard to move for any return, and I dont think the Leafs are desperate enough for cap to move him for nothing and open a moderate hole on the defence. After that, who are you moving? Holl has been a competent RHD, Rielly/Muzzin/Barrie are all locked in unless were tanking, and were trying to see what we have in Dermott.

In the event of one of the top six being injured long-term you might see Rasmus Sandin, but I dont think thats actually the most likely, since it burns an ELC year for him and hes still very young.

You know that Time Crisis game thats at every arcade-ish place where you move between set locations desperately trying to hang on while the game drains every single token youve got in your pocket?

That or Lemmings. I hope its not the lemmings.

I have a torts exam tomorrow. I spent the whole semester looking at cat videos and am not completely sure what a tort is. I know it comes from Latin and that it has something to do with Mrs. Palsgraf. Any advice?Mr Smithy

Basically everything is negligence. Everyone has a duty of care to everyone else. (Except, in most civil contexts, the police.) Just describe everyone as arguably liable and call it a day.

Why do carolers demand so much figgy pudding and why is it so coveted? If I were a Christmas caroler (which I never have been and never will, its figgin creepy to sing outside someones house) Id ask for like hot chocolate or a piece of Toblerone or something.Mike Browns Moustache

According to Wikipedia, figgy pudding was slang for raisin or plum pudding. Now, you might say, wait, those puddings also dont sound very good. But you have to remember this carol dates from the mid-1800s and the children singing it were Dickensian street urchins warbling for the calories they needed to survive another day chimney sweeping.

Actually, We Wish You A Merry Christmas can be read as an evolving class consciousness on the part of the impoverished carolers. In the early verses they are subservient to capital and making social niceties as they hope for some pay for their labour. By the last one theyre saying they wont go until we get some, which is clearly a nascent sit-down strike. Viva la revolucion. Christmas carols suck.

Whats your favourite/most fucked up Pokemon concept and/or Pokedex entry? This question is inspired after I was replaying through Black recently and noticed this delightful entry for Yamask:

Each of them carries a mask that used to be its face when it was human. Sometimes they look at it and cry.

Brigstew

The entry for Haunter in Pokemon Silver was: Its tongue is made of gas. If licked, its victim starts shaking constantly until death eventually comes.

That sounds awful, man!

As the star of the Back to Excited podcast, what will Fulecat be getting for Christmas?LeafsFan709

Actual answer: we get him these little foam soccer balls. He ignores most toys but he goes absolutely bananas hunting these things. One of these days hell start doing it mid-pod and itll sound like I have a raging leopard in the house.

How much ground could a ground hog hug if a ground hog could hug ground?JaredFromLondon

Im trying to put together some kind of libertarian reference joke here about Atlas Hugged and Im just getting nowhere. Were 3700 words in here! Im only human.

Tell us about cat fight club and cat hunger games I know about your catsseroles. You target the ones with the best insurance policies. I want full details.

I want a written explanation and cat gifs.Bobq27

I dont know what this means but were clearly pro cat on this website. The evidence is all around.

If Mike Wazowski grew hair below his mouth, would you call it a goatee or pubes?crazyliver

I would call the police! Jesus, man, there is some knowledge humans are not meant to have.

Starting lineup of the most unlikable Leafs youve ever seen play for the team. Not the worst necessarily, but the ones you hated seeing on the ice the most.TomK421

Matt Martin - Ben Smith - David Clarkson

Dion Phaneuf - Cody Ceci

Andrew Raycroft

Most of these players were just bad or not worth their salaries, which isnt so much their fault. Some even waived NMCs to leave, for which I am grateful. Raycroft is really annoying though.

Who is a trade target that youd like to see the Leafs go after this season and is under the radar?thehumourisironic

I dont know that this quite counts as under the radar, but I have long coveted a couple of Minnesotas defencemen, and they have over $21M a year until 2023 committed to Jared Spurgeon, Ryan Suter, and Matt Dumba. Jonas Brodin might be the odd man out there, with one year after this one at $4.167M. Hes a physical, good defensive defenceman who shoots left but often plays right (granted, everyone in Minnesota looks good defensively, but hey.) If Toronto is tracking for the playoffs and Minnesota falls back away from the pack (theyve been surging lately), maybe theres a deal to be made around Brodin as a rental plus one or at a lower price in the summer.

If you were re-casting the movie Roadhouse, which Leafs or Leafs-adjacent figures would play which role?I Am Rad Boss

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Mailbag: What To Do With The Leafs Defence And Some Horror Movies I Did Not Watch - Pension Plan Puppets

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero