Watch it here if you missed it:
Cathy Squires
- I like him. He's personable and funny, and totally at ease with reporters.
- He's gold plating the brass plaque on Brandon Pridham's door as he clearly loves the guy, his work, and thinks he's a genius.
- He never mentioned Laurence Gilman who he actually worked with in the past, but he repeated many times that he has to get to know people.
- He is going to visit Auston Matthews, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's today. It's like paying homage to the local King, and sets up the pecking order – as it should be. You can find a GM any old place, Auston Matthews requires lottery luck and tanking at just the right time.
- Treliving talks a lot about skill, but when he started rattling off the stats for the Leafs, and had some specfics that sounded like some way to measure the effect of forechecking on regaining possession.
Okay, an aside here, because I just saw this yesterday. There was a conversation thread about an attempt (not yet made) to quantify the value of the support players for volume shooters. The Leafs, in case you were unaware, have one of the top volume shooters in the NHL. His support players are the single most important players on the team after him.
And this was the most succinct way of putting this.
Here I'm thinking of something more basic - shooting gives up possession of the puck so you need some way of getting it back
— Micah Blake McCurdy (@IneffectiveMath) May 31, 2023
If Brad Treliving gets this, and isn't just talking about checking and skill in that extremely old-fashioned way of seeing it as a see-saw where you give up one to get the other, then I'm all for him.
- He had a lot of good things to say about Sheldon Keefe's improvements to the team.
- I liked him most because he's just unabashedly enthusiastic about the Leafs. No one is ever enthusiastic about this team because that's not cool. Trying hard, working hard, knowing how hard it is, that all seems a bit too sincere. No one will laugh bitterly at genuine optimism, it makes them too uncomfortable. Suggest Auston Matthews is getting $x million dollars and the calls to trade him are loud and long. He can't even play anymore, he's broken! Suggest, like Treliving did, that the Leafs players are good, and you get those good players with all that pain, and the response is to want to trade them because obviously they only care about money.
- Most of all I liked the part where he said you knock on the door, and you keep knocking and knocking and eventually you get in. Because now I know what his ideology of the game is. What he believes you do when you fail. I just hope he gets how that relates to goaltending, because almost no one seems to.
And one final note, the last question was to Shanahan and it sought to get Shanahan to say something negative about Dubas and the timing of the Penguins' announcement. It was cheap and childish, and Shanahan's answer was excellent. It's shit like that that gives reporters a bad name, but that's not the bulk of the people reporting on the Leafs, just a few old dinosaurs.
