A Strike At The Heart

So much for the bulletproof bullpen.

The Blue Jays relief staff had been, in the words of TV play-by-play man and former manager Buck Martinez, "lights out" in the first nine games of the season, but in the 10th, oh my, did they they get tuned.

In a defeat that goes beyond simply evening the young team's record at 5-5 on the season, a succession of Jays relievers squandered a seven-run lead earned against one of baseball's best pitchers, Felix Hernandez, then saw Shawn Camp allow a two-out, walkoff base hit to Luis Rodriguez lose 8-7 to the Seattle Mariners Monday night. Rodriguez had a fabulous at-bat, fighting off pitch after pitch, before beating Camp with a drive to right field.

Ugly, but worth staying up for if you've never seen a seven-run lead evaporate before. It was the third straight loss on the first part of this long road trip for the Jays, who have played one nailbiter after another this season. All kinds of things are happening, too, with Rajai Davis on the DL, Juan Rivera not hitting, Brandon Morrow still working his way back, the experiment of starting Edwin Encarnacion at third an apparent bust because of Encarnacion's wild throwing arm and now the bullpen bashed around in Seattle.

Now you really need staff ace Ricky Romero to come up big Tuesday against the Mariners and stop the bleeding, which is what you want your No. 1 starter to do.

Certainly no dull moments with these Blue Jays so far. Manager John Farrell has them playing a far more aggressive game on the basepaths these days, and there have been nights when the bats have been explosive. Monday night should have been the team's sixth win in 10 starts, but once David Purcey, and then Octavio Dotel, started walking Mariners, you started to get a feeling something ugly was in the works.

And it was.

 

 

 

The Captain's Response

Maybe it's a sign of Dion Phaneuf's growth.

Or maybe it's a sign that Phaneuf knows when to listen to Brian Burke.

Either way, it's reasonable to suggest the decision by the Leaf captain to accept an invitation to play for his country at the upcoming world hockey championships is a very good thing.

There is, of course, always the possibility of injury. Beyond that, however, it's not only an opportunity for Phaneuf to play a leading role for Team Canada overseas and continue growing his game as he did in the final half of the season, it's a chance for him to reassert himself into the larger Olympic conversation for 2014.

Now we don't even know if the NHL will be in Sochi. What we do know is that in a matter of months Phaneuf went from being a lock for the 2010 Olympic squad to barely a consideration, his stock plummeting as Team Canada scouts looked at the state of his game.

That was all before the trade that brought him to Toronto, and most agree his play in the second half of this season, particularly the reigniting of his offensive game, were positive signs for his career. It's pretty much established that playing in the world championships has aided the Olympic aspirations of a few Canadian players in recent years, and so it could help Phaneuf.

Maybe he'd rather have headed straight to his P.E.I. retreat, and he's turned down invitations to this event before. But you have to know Burke wanted him to go because Burke believes in the value of the worlds as both a competition and as an information gathering excercise. Having both Luke Schenn and James Reimer along for the ride won't hurt either; improving the Leafs defensive shield will be an important element in getting this club back to the Stanley Cup playoffs some day.

They are three players that played well for the team this season, yes, but also three players who still need to make improvements to their games if they are going to be dominant forces in the seasons to come.

 

 

Murray Stays In Charge

So it would appear Bryan Murray has emerged victorious in the ongoing power struggle in the nation's capital. Murray learned some tough lessons earlier in his career about in-house politics while with Washington and Detroit, and as John Muckler found out, he knows how to put those lessons to good use at this stage of his career.

Senators observers suggested Murray was locked in a battle with Ottawa team president Cyril Leeder over the future of the team, and the announcement today that Murray has received a new three-year contract extension seems to confirm that he has cemented his power base with owner Eugene Melnyk.

There have been so many conflicting moves by the Sens over the past few months that reports of the power struggle made sense. On one hand, the club was trading away veterans like Mike Fisher, Chris Kelly, Chris Campoli and Jarko Ruutu; on the other hand, veteran defenceman Chris Phillips signed a new contract and veteran goalie Craig Anderson was acquired from Colorado, then signed.

It was hard to figure out whether this was a rebuild, or something else. The fact that the Sens were at the bottom of the Eastern Conference after making the playoffs last year made it unclear exactly how the club saw itself.

We'll now find out where Murray wants to go. He'll surely draft high in June, and the Sens have a decent crop of prospects coming. Anderson better be the answer in net.

But more important, he has to solve three problems.

First, he has to find a head coach he can live with. Since leaving the Ottawa head coaching postion in 2007, he has hired John Paddock, Craig Hartsburg and Cory Clouston, and quickly found all three wanting. It's expected Clouston will be fired shortly.

Second, he's got to find a way to move centre Jason Spezza, whose time has run out in Ottawa.  Murray tried to do this last summer and couldn't. With four more years left at a cap hit of $7 million per, moving Spezza is no easy task.

Third, resolve the future of Daniel Alfredsson. Alfredsson will be 39 in December and managed only 54 games this season. His productivity has dropped off, but he's still the team captain. Problem is, with two more years at $4.875 million, it will be tough to move Alfredsson even if Ottawa wants to try and get something for him.

In sum, congratulation on the extension. Now back to the headaches.

Vindication in the Wind

You can bet Paul Maurice heard the talk as he was leaving town.

He heard his successor as head coach of the Maple Leafs, Ron Wilson, suggest that the team was out of shape, and that a little cracking the whip was all the team required to get rid of "blue-and-white disease." Maurice took some time off before returning to the Carolina Hurricanes, but never forgot the manner in which he was dismissed after only two years behind the Leaf bench and the way in which it was suggested he simply hadn't been up to the job of coaching in Toronto.

Never mind the fact that in three seasons Wilson hasn't come close to the 91 points Maurice was able to accumulate in the first of his two seasons with the Leafs. What matters now is that over the next two days he has a chance to guide the Hurricanes into an 11th hour playoff berth, and if he can do that, some sense of vindication will be his for once again doing something this season that Wilson could not do with the Leafs.

Atlanta's stunning 3-0 victory over the New York Rangers on Thursday night put the Canes squarely in control of their playoff fate. Regardless of what the Rangers do in their season-ending game against New Jersey on Saturday, Carolina can grab a playoff berth over the Blueshirts with victories in Atlanta on Friday night and then over Tampa Bay at home on Saturday.

Neither one of those is a gimmee. But if the Canes can do it, it will be at least partially because of the terrific coaching job done by Maurice, whose team is hardly more talented than the Rangers or even the Leafs, but has been running hard for weeks now on the strength of Cam Ward's excellence in goal, Eric Staal's leadership and the goal-scoring of Jeff Skinner, likely to be name winner of the Calder Trophy in June as the league's rookie-of-the-year.

The Rangers have been a bizarre club over the final two weeks of the season, a squad that was blasted on Long Island last week, then rebounded with impressive wins over Philly and Boston, then coughed up a furball to the Thrashers to put their playoff lives in peril. The loss of Ryan Callahan to a broken ankle was an important loss, but could it possibly have derailed the season?

Last season, the Rangers blew a playoff berth on the final day of the season. If they miss this spring, you have to wonder about the future of John Tortorella as head coach after three seasons. And what of Glen Sather, the GM, in charge of the Rangers since 2000 but without even one serious playoff run? During Sather's tenure, the club has won two playoff series and had a very uneven drafting record with the likes of Hugh Jessiman (12th in '03), Al Montoya (6th in '04) and Bob Sanguinetti (21st in '06, just ahead of Claude Giroux and Semyon Varlamov). They also had the tragedy of having their '07 first rounder, Alexei Cherepanov, die during a KHL game in Russia.

Like the Leafs, the Rangers have struggled to navigate the post-lockout era and the salary cap as successfully as they could during the days when they could spend and then spend some more. For New York, that was expressed most vividly this season in being forced to bury Wade Redden and his $6.5 million salary in the minors after signing him as a free agent. These days, the Rangers seem stucky in the NHL's mushy middle, not good enough to play with the big boys and not bad enough to stock their roster with quality draft picks.

But maybe Tortorella's club will hold off the Hurricanes. If not, it will be a terrific story in Raleigh, which hosted the NHL all-star game this season and has been nipping at the heels of the Rangers and Sabres over the entire winter. It would also be a nice way for Maurice to express the possibility that he could have done just as solid a job in Toronto had he been given the chance.

 

 

Time to Turn The Page

The cavalry never did arrive.

A big part of the reason, of course, is that Buffalo, Carolina and the Rangers never opened the door quite enough to allow the Leafs to receive the help they would have required to get into the 2011 post-season tournament.

The Leafs at least made those teams make their putts. The Rangers, for example, had to go into a tough Philly rink yesterday and extract two points, which they did with a gritty, impressive performance.

Hard to blame the Leafs for that. They'd at least helped sound the the alarm in Ranger headquarters Saturday night with their sixth win in seven games, a 4-2 triumph in Ottawa.

At this point, it would be an achievement for the Leafs to get ninth place in the Eastern Conference, and that's pretty thin gruel. Ditto for the fact they are now 20th overall, which means that if things stay that way and Boston doesn't win the draft lottery on April 12th, the second first rounder the Bruins received from the Phil Kessel deal won't be a top 10 selection.

It'll still be a good pick of course. But the Leaf National Nightmare would be over, the tally will be final (Tyler Seguin, Jared Knight and somebody with this year's pick) and the screechers who guaranteed a Leaf apocalypse - back-to-back top two picks for Kessel/the sky is falling!! - will have been proven to be incorrect.

In five years, we'll know if the Leafs truly overpaid for Kessel. But not until then.

Meanwhile, the math may still tells us the Leafs are alive, but it's really time to move on to the next important question.

What now?

At this moment, the Leafs have two picks in the bottom third of the June entry draft to work with, plus an estimated $15 million or so in cap space this summer, and that's after signing James Reimer, Clarke MacArthur, Tyler Bozak and Luke Schenn to new contracts as restricted free agents.

That's not a bad position to be in for a club that will finish with between 84 and 90 points and one of the youngest rosters in hockey. If anything, however, it's the next move, or moves, and the process of trying to get the club not only back into post-season play but to the level of a serious playoff squad that will be tougher.

In other words, having gone from smoking crater to cinder block foundation with some landscaping in place, the more difficult job of designing a custom made home for a finicky customer begins now.

The natural inclination will be to argue that spending a zillion dollars on one player - Brad Richards - is the answer. Problem is, the corollary to that is that the Leafs are one player away, and they're not. 

Moreover, the absence of gigantic, multi-year committments to individuals is part of what has the Leafs in this relatively favourable position for a non-playoff team. Some of the trades the team hasn't made, like dealing for Marc Savard last summer, have turned out to be decisions that have been beneficial, rather than costly.

In some ways, the situations of the Leafs and Blue Jays are similar, if not exact. Jays president Paul Beeston has made it clear he's ready to go to Rogers and ask for extra payroll monies when he thinks the time is right, and he doesn't think that time is now.

For the Leafs, it could be they're not at the point where spending $8 million a season on a player like Richards is the smartest move. There will be free agent options in the years ahead.

Really, the Leafs want to position themselves to eventually do what helped fuel Washington's late season charge this year, and that's add expensive veterans - Scott Hannan, Jason Arnott, Dennis Wideman - to try and put a young club over the top.

It's extremely unlikely that the Leafs will do anything like trade young players or picks for older talent, and more likely that they'll try to combine the assets they have to add a blue chip player that matches the age of their core group, somewhere between the ages of 22 and 26.

Richards turns 31 next month and is coming off a serious concussion. In 12 games since returning, he has two goals and six assists. If he were looking for a three-year committment as an unrestricted free agent this summer, it might be a better fit for the Leafs, but he'll be looking for something much longer. And will get it. 

There's 25-year-old Paul Stastny, who didn't have a great season this year but would be Toronto's No. 1 centre. The cap hit is heavy at $6.6 million, but only for three more years. Depending on where Colorado is heading, he could be available. Or somebody like him.

Or, could Burke package the two firsts he owns and a young player - Nik Kulemin, Carl Gunnarson? - and move up in the draft to take a shot at a more talented prospect.  The question for chief scout Dave Morrison to answer would be whether there's something truly compelling outside the top four - Gabriel Landeskog, Adam Larsson, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Sean Courturier - that would make it worth Toronto's efforts, because getting into that top four would be awfully tough.

If you could get Couturier, a big centre, and line him up with Nazem Kadri and Joe Colborne, you're looking at the strength down the middle that good teams are always looking for. But again, getting into that top four would be tough.

That said, a higher first round pick and some medium-priced UFAs could be correct approach for this off-season. Certainly, Colby Armstrong and Clarke MacArthur paid off handsomely last summer. That would leave room to see if other young players in the Leaf system like Jerry D'Amigo, Matt Frattin, Simon Gysbers and Colborne, for example, might be ready to make the big jump, and also leave space to re-sign the likes of Darryl Boyce, Joey Crabb and Tim Brent, all impending UFAs who made significant contributions this season.

That's the path I'd choose, particularly if, as reported, Ilya Bryzgalov has no interest in the Leafs. Others would go the Richards route. It's not a simple choice. That's why Burke gets the big money.

 

 

 

 

A Break from the Race

BOSTON--Good thing there's not trying to open the baseball season here today. Messy, with slush and snow and rain, is your forecast. Even a team being heralded as the best Red Sox team EVER (honest) might have trouble in that weather.

It's hockey weather, really. But let's take a quick break from the Leaf playoff push to point towards another big sporting event today, and that's the clash between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer down in Miami tonight.

Couple of interesting things at play here. It's the first time in four years they've met in anything but a tournament final, and really, once of the rare occasions they actually get to face one another. They played twice last year, twice in 2009. They haven't clashed on U.S. soil in six years. So it's a special occasion just on that basis.

What makes this different, meanwhile, is that they're not only not in the final together - this is a semifinal - but the winner faces a significant hurdle, unlike other occasions. Novak Djokovic of Serbia is arguably the game's best player right now - he's ranked No. 2 in the world behind Nadal and just ahead of Federer - and he likely awaits the winner of Nadal-Federer unlike American veteran Mardy Fish has a huge upset in mind this afternoon.

That said, Nadal-Federer is still the match most want to see, and the tennis world has been repeatedly denied the privilege in recent years because of injuries, upsets and other reasons.

But in steamy Miami tonight, the two greats clash, and with both still near or at the top of the game. Between them they have accumulated more than $100 million of career winnings, but it won't last forever. Federer is 29, and starting, perhaps, to slow. You can bet this is one of those contests that will attract even the non-tennis fan.