Welcome to November, everyone. I know technically, yesterday was the first day of November, but we all slept through that, right?

If you actually woke up enough to check the FTB yesterday, you saw that Species has made a Fanpost for you all to discuss the US Election:

PPP US Election Open Chat

It would be extremely appreciated if conversation on that topic was confined to that post.

So, yeah, here we are on the eve of ... something. Three months of court cases, a landslide, a sea change, more of the same. It’s just yet another in the long list of lessons that the future is not predictable. I’d really rather go back to using arguments about hockey player points to illustrate that point.

A couple of things to remember:

There are members of out community who are American and live in the USA. This isn’t abstract to them.

There are members of our community who are racialized, LGBTQ, and not cis men. Some of us feel a visceral fear about the future. It’s not abstract the things that have become political point scoring topics.

It would be really cool to have some hockey to distract ourselves with right now. And later this morning, I’ll have another edition of the European report, and it’s got some cool goal videos in it, I promise you. But it also has a lot of COVID-19 news in it. I wish it didn’t, but the people who pretend the KHL putting teenagers on the ice because half the rest of the team is sick is super neato because prospects!!! make me queasy. I never want to join their number.

It doesn’t seem to be a good time to construct a fantasy world to live in, so hockey has a lot of ugly reality in it. But it’s still a game we love, and it usually brightens up a dark winter. But it’s largely gone into hibernation, and we don’t really know when the NHL will be back.

We have the WJC from late December into January, but unless you’re really, really into QMJHL games played in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, there’s not much else on offer. However, if you head on over to the Fanpost section either to find the politics talk or to avoid it completely, there’s some other things to read:

Predicting the unpredictable: 2021 Maple Leafs Lineup
How to resolve the Leafs defence
Leafs Postseason Rankings

I’d like to invite you all to consider writing something about hockey, the Leafs, the prospects, the history or the future of the team if you’re of a mind to. This site is always better if more people say what they think, and sometimes the comments aren’t enough. I’ll admit the fanpost editor is... vintage, but it works. If you do write something, please link it in the FTB so we can all see it, and some posts might end up on the front page — that involves me messing with that vintage editor, so it’s not guaranteed.

You have to be a member of the site to publish a Fanpost, and if you’re not, you can see a link at the bottom of every comment section to join.

News

There is a little. Not really Leafs news, although if you slept through more than just yesterday and missed the Hutchinson signing... uh, yeah, Michael Hutchinson is bravely a Maple Leaf again.

Leafs sign Michael Hutchinson, causing me a brief flash of personal anxiety
Maple Leafs sign Joey Anderson

You can tell it’s late in free agency because I saw at least 14 tweets about Carolina re-signing a depth guy, and then multiple people dropped everything to break this news:

This showed up last night, and it’s interesting to see someone who is a beat reporter for a team, has been for years, but is still so out of the loop they found this topic shocking when presented with TSN’s documentary on the issue:

And yet, it’s important that people get to the place of enlightenment I guess, not so important when they arrive.

And I really don’t like November Rain, so you get this instead:

From The Branches