Brace yourselves fellow Leafs fans, there's word at this hour that Darcy Tucker will be sidelined for an undetermined period of time with a knee injury. In typical Maple Leaf fashion, that's all the information we have right now. We don't know when Tucker hurt the knee, whether it's the reason he's been mediocre all season or which knee it is.
Wellwood's still not back, Tucker's out and the Leafs are blowing leads left, right and centre. Mississauga Mike cracked open Exel and crunched some numbers and here's what he shared with me yesterday.
The Leafs are currently the 13th place team for the total amount of points in the NHL. I wanted to explore further how many of those points they EARNED versus how many points they received for losing:
- TML tied for 13th place in the NHL for total points (8pts)
- TML is ranked 17th place in the NHL for total wins (3 wins)
- TML is tied for 27th place in the NHL with TOTAL losses (4 regulation, 2 OTL) OR more bluntly stated, they have the 2nd most losses in the NHL with 6 total losses.
And the kicker? The Leafs are tied for 6th place in the Eastern Conference, although they are bumped down to 9th on the rankings, still tied. So if there were no points awarded for losing in overtime, the Leafs would be ALOT worse at this stage and then maybe some red flags would go up in Leaf land.
Firstly Mississauga Mike, the red flags are fully erect. Swiss cheese defense will do that. Three teams in our division have played two less games, all but two of our games thus far have been at home, and we've only won 1/3 of 'em. We are definitely a worse team than our 9th place conference standing reveals.
We need a healthy Tucker, a healthy Wellwood and the hockey equivalent of Bryan Colangelo. We also need Sundin to become ten years younger, Pogge to blossom into a young Eddie Belfour and a reversal of the Kordic for Courtnall deal that haunts me to this day.
Where have you gone, Miroslav Frycer?
