I Keep Trash Bags With Me

... Never known when you gotta dump a body. Noted optimist eyebleaf alerted me to this article posted on some Ottawa blog: A Brief Look at the Toronto Maple Leafs. We here at PPP Amalgamated Heavy Industries and Kitten Petting Consortium LLC GmbH S.A. believe in equal opportunity team bashing and feel it's our duty as a captain of industry to respond to any and all poorly written articles that are derogatory about God's Team.

The Leafs bashing article starts off with this image which is hysterical if you and your dad both know your sister intimately and use that commonality as a basis for discussion at the dinner table. Be fair though.  That the world outside of Ottawa has mostly moved on from insulting people based on their sexual preferences shouldn't cause us to judge their puerile insults harshly; they're misguided and it probably has something to do with the water in Ottawa. We should take pity on their wretched souls.

I despise the city of Toronto, and everything in it.

I hate driving through it. If I'm moving at all, I invariably get stuck behind some putz doing eighty, weaving all over eight lanes of the 401 because he's yammering on his cell phone.

So this guy is swerving over eight lanes of traffic and the author is stuck behind him? Either this guy really sucked at Frogger growing up or he's following some maniac to try and get a glimpse of his newfangled "cellular telephone". Don't worry buddy, mobile phone service will make its way out to Ottawa eventually. (Save your first phone, eventually it'll be cool in an ironic way. We call it the "Zack Morris".)

I hate flying over it.  It happens every time.  Just as I'm finishing my complimentary stale peanut and seven dollar thimble of Coors Light, the announcement comes: *kshhhht*  "Ladies and uhhhhhh...gentlemen, this is your captain.  If you'd...uhhhhh...care to look to your left, you'll see the tallest free standing structure in the world, the...uhhhhhh...CN Tower"  No, actually, I can't see it.  And do you know why I can't see it, you glorified fucking cabbie??  I'M IN AN AISLE SEAT, YOU FUCK!

Apparently Toronto sucks as a city because SLC sits on aisle seats in planes where his legs are cramped up. (N.B. Most people sitting in the aisle on a plane stick their legs into the aisle to use more leg room.) It can be weird leaving your tiny home and travelling to a city full of sights and sounds but if you approach it with an open mind the big city isn't so scary.

The Leafs last won a Stanley Cup in 1967.  Since then, they've been a 42 year train wreck of mean, miserly, and hysterically incompetent ownership, interspersed with just enough success to keep a fawning Leaf Nation from finally waking the fuck up and questioning whether maybe, just maybe, there may not be a better way of going about things than grabbing its ankles and begging for more.

This is my favorite game. The Ottawa Senators last won the Stanley Cup in "never", despite one of their players scoring a cup winning goal in 2007. The team the Ottawa Senators stole their name from was wildly successful, winning the Stanley Cup in 1927 and then being moved to St. Louis before being dissolved because no one wanted to see them play. To quote Wikipedia:

Despite finishing in last place for the second year in a row, the Senators actually improved their attendance over the previous season.

Terrible team? Financial trouble? Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, no?

(Dear Leaf Nation: For those of you too young to remember, or otherwise unfamiliar, the Stanley Cup Final is the round that comes after the...ah, fuck it...never mind).  The other 2.4% will come from snickering opponents as they dance and whirl around, through and over the Leafs paleolithic defence on the way to yet another power play goal.  Sorry Leafers, there really is nothing else behind the curtain.

Courtesy of Excel Emperor daoust:

Regular Season - since 92/93

Playoffs - since 92/93

Ottawa will be icing a top six D of Kuba, Phillips, Volchenkov, Lee, Picard and Campoli. I don't need to say anything witty about that.

From Tiger Williams through Nick Kypreos, Tie Domi, Mark Bell, Darcy Tucker, and Gary Fucking Roberts (Yeah, I said it!), the Leafs boast a proud history of cheap shotting, chicken shit cock gobblers who won't hesitate to spear, slew foot, dive, whine, cry, or bleed on cue if it means they won't have to answer for their pussified behaviour on the ice.

Aside from crashing his teammates into trees Dany Heatley loves to kick people, Daniel Alfredsson shoots pucks at the other team after the whistle when his team is getting smeared and as far as not answering for their behavior on the ice I'm pretty sure we all saw Tucker dive into the Sens bench. The Leafs haven't been the wimp team in this rivalry in the past and I doubt they will be in the future either.

Your instinctive reaction to brand anyone born after 1967 who may have had the temerity to develop an affinity toward another Canadian team as Johnny-come-lately traitors worthy of grunted derision betrays that which you fear the most, namely that sooner or later, everyone will realize that the Blue and White isn't some holy flag flying on a crusader's staff, but the colours of a historically mediocre to comically putrid hockey team that will never, ever, win anything ever again.

Historically mediocre? That must be compared to Ottawa who went undefeated from 1934 to 1991 right? Good job adding another gutless lazy floater who's already gone on record saying he wants to retire somewhere else. Alex Kovalev was been born in a Soviet slop trough and even he doesn't want to be in Ottawa.