On the eleventh day of Leafsmas
Burkie gave to me...
Eleven Effort Level
Ten Players Swapping
Nine Forwards Dangling
Eight Brents-A-Renting
Seven First Round Draft Picks
Six Years of Cheering
Five In A Row!
Four Years of Brad,
Three Luke Schenns,
Two Special Teams
and
A center for Phil Kessel
MF37, or Bitter Leaf Fan as he's better known, returns for day 11:
I was originally going to go with Eleven Snipers Sniping but Vinay touched on this on Day 9 with his 9 Forwards Dangling. Besides, eleven snipers is not remotely close to the Platonic ideal of a hockey team as espoused by Brian Burke, which we all know is 6 snipers sniping and 6 plumbers plumbing (or as it’s played out in Toronto so far: 1.5 snipers sniping, 2 plumbers plumbing, 6 guys laying goose eggs, and 4 turtling doves).
Next on my idea list was identifying $11 million in under-performing/bad contracts. A task that is way too easy to do with this club so long as you’re ok with rounding errors (Komisarek + Giguere=$11M; Phaneuf+Armstrong+Lebda=$11M; Komisarek+Armstrong+Lebda+Orr+Mitchell=$11M. This little cap geek game is like the worst version of boggle ever.) The problem with this idea is that if the Leafs got $11M in new cap space for Leafmas, I’m sure they'd just spend it on more underperforming, overpaid UFAs (please see The 12 days of Festivus song - 8 guys a-milking their contracts).
So for the eleventh day of Leafmas, I’m going to go with the great Nigel Tufnel and wish for the Leafs to get their effort level up to 11.
Next time the Leafs go all the way up, all the way up, all the way up and need "that extra push over the cliff" to win a game, they’ll have another notch to go.