Puck Drop: 7PM ET Sportsnet

The NHL is back. I don't really like Olympic hockey that much; it tears cohesive fanbases apart and subjects us to a week of good teams vs. Norway and Belarus before spending two days on the actual good games.

In a lot of ways watching the Toronto Maple Leafs is like cheering for Switzerland. They're terrible now but they show some promise and in thirty or forty years they might get their act together and go on a run.

Tonight real hockey's back when the Carolina Hurricanes and Toronto Maple Leafs will both sit their pending UFAs in advance of tomorrow's trade deadline. Rookie goaltender Justin Peters gets the start for Carolina. He's played two NHL games and let in 3 goals total for a 1.50GAA and a .950SV%. In Toronto's end of the ice J.S. Giguere gets the nod.

So far Giguere has either shut the other team out or ended the night stopping less than 90% of the pucks he saw. I don't know what to make of that at all to be honest. It's an obviously small sample size but so far Giguere's been flawless or mediocre.

Expect Alexei Ponikarovsky to sit out tonight: the Leafs had one odd man out at practice today and Poni is the most likely person to be moved tomorrow at 3PM.

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