NHL Stanley Cup Finals 2009

I have to tell you, I really want to see the Penguins holding that cup up above their shoulders. Detroit had it last year and — most importantly — Pittsburgh have gone through some bad times shortly after the trade deadline with long lasting loosing streaks, and yet they’d managed to climb out of the hole, land in the playoffs and crawl up top once again in a very hard-working way.

But then you have to look at the Detroit and how they play. They play so well, I haven’t an idea of what can possibly beat the Detroit Red Wings. Especially today with the comeback of Pavel Datsyuk they had a blast, and I’m not just talking about the scoring.

Anyways, it looks like the cup is going in the same direction. But, needless to say when talking about hockey, anything can happen in the last little bit.

I’m just really glad that the series has gone for at least 6 games.

Will the Maple Leafs get into playoffs this year?

Despite being a true Leafs fan, I will still have to say “no”.

The Leafs right now have 52 points in 56 games that they played. Only 26 regular season games remain.

The last playoff spot is currently occupied by Buffalo (whom they host tonight) that has 64 points in 57 games they played. Buffalo’s winning percentage so far has thus been 0.561. Given the fact that every team that’s close to be out of or in the playoffs makes that last push to stay in the race, I say the last playoff spot must have a winning percentage of at least 0.570%. Therefore, to get that last playoff spot, the Leafs are going to have to push for 94 points. That is, they will need to gain 42 points in the 26 remaining games. They will need to win at least 21 out of the 26 remaining games.

Unless Brian Burke has something special in mind (starting tonight) and Ron Wilson knows what to do with that something special, Houston we have a problem.

Toronto Maple Leafs Had It Tonight

Tampa Bay Lightning 3 at Toronto Maple Leafs 4 in the shoot out.

Good game (here). I am glad Toronto had it tonight. They did work hard to get it and that ought to bring tonnes of spirit in their hearts. Especially after their long lasting downfall, which at the last game with New York Rangers seemed to have had almost a negatively infinite derivative. More about it here.

Scott Clemmensen, the backup goalie for the Leafs, turned out to be a great goalie. He stood really well throughout the game and he was outstanding on the shootout! Great job.

I am very sorry for Andrew Raycroft, for it will now be very unlikely that we will see him goaltending any time soon, considering the Scott Clemmensen’s play. But with all seriousness, Maple Leafs is better this way, at least for now, and so is Raycroft, there is no doubt. Raycroft is a good goalie, but he just has to gain his full potential, and that takes time.

Jason Blake finally had really something going tonight, as he picked up 3 points (one goal and two assists). Moreover, it was his goal that brought Toronto back from a 1:0 fallback behind the Lightning — as I said here, he did get the Leafs going tonight.

Holiday Presents Rush

Since we do not celebrate catholic Christmas, our “holiday presents rush”, as I shall relate to it, is generally not from 20th to 24th of December, but rather from 26th to 31st of December, and is intended towards the New Year — the holiday that we do celebrate. It is, in a way, a benefit, because we thus usually take advantage of all the discounts, related to boxing day.

What I realised yesterday is that I enjoy seeking presents for others. I spent a number of hours looking for a present for my fiancee and my mother. The present for my mother is specific: it is a China ink (or whatever it is called), and funny thing is that, as I visited about 7 stores to find it, I was called a “cute man” for doing that several times, because I was looking for something totally man-unrelated and I didn’t know the heck about it, yet I still was looking for it. The present for my fiancee is not revealed here for understandable reasons; but I hope she’ll like it. This present I trying to find for close to a month now, may be. So, even though, looking for presents may seem a bit of a pain in your funny body parts, it isn’t that for me at all (well, at least not at all of the times), probably because I always try have in mind this big, wide and beautiful smile of that person when he opens up the present.

I bought my brother some hockey equipment and decided to not wait until the New Year, but rather give him the present early, so we could go and try, while both of us have holidays. It was his first time on skates… So he fell a few times. Most of the times it wasn’t so bad. Except for one time: he fell right onto his funniest body part. And even though he said he enjoyed that night of hockey very much, I know how much it hurts, so I don’t know if this was a good present or not :) But with all the seriousness, it was a good present, no doubt — I could tell from the smile on his face.

What about Toronto Maple Leafs?

I would like to drop a word about how the performance of Toronto Maple Leafs, a hockey team in the NHL, looks so far.

As November appeared undoubtfully a complete disaster with a record of 4-6-3 (4 wins, 6 losses, 3 over-time losses), Leafs seemed to have had a comeback in the beginning of December with a 4 game winning streak, with one of the wins being a really good takeover the New York Rangers (a 6:2 win) and another being a complete knock-out to the Tampa Bay Lightning (a 6:1 win).

But no! Toronto is loosing again and loosing big time. For the past three weeks, Toronto had all of their games away — that’s 7 games. The hopes were high above the ceiling on bringing “all of them[, because] we’ve got to be greedy!” as Paul Maurice said the day before the team left for a long trip. As it turned out, the Leafs ended up with a 2-3-2 record, which isn’t as bad as one would imagine, unless one actually considers the play that Toronto shows lately.

The only person on the team who actually shows some (excellent) play is the main goalie, Vesa Toskala. He has done so much for the team already, by making an enormous amount of excellent saves and stops. If Toskala wasn’t on the goal, I am confident Toronto would loose almost all of the games, no doubt. But a goalie, although being one of the most important part of the team, cannot make the play all by his own. Firstly, a goalie can stop all the goals, but if the team hasn’t got any offense going, then no good. Secondly, a goalie can be puck-proof for only so much and if the team’s defense has apparent wide holes, then no goalie would be perfect enough: there are just certain types of shots that, no matter how brilliant the goalie is, they are definitely scoring ones, unless the attempts themselves are stopped by the defense.

As it has already been said, Toronto have got no offence going at all. The thing that startles me is that any time the Leafs try to make an attack and get into the offensive zone, they start making all these useless passes, which have no real logical smart combination behind it, and hence all Toronto ends up with is usually no shot on goal at all.

And it is actually clearly seen that Toronto haven’t got any combinations prepared for the game: I never have the feeling that one Leaf knows where the other one is, no clear passes, no clear break throughs, no organisation of play, no nothing, really. In terms of offensive breakthroughs, I think that the best player is Jason Blake. He often makes very nice and interesting moves to get through the defence and usually gets Toronto going. But I think the only problem is that he doesn’t yet feel the team (it is his first season for the Leafs), because any attack he gets to do — he usually does it either on his own or his passes are not understand as well as they must be.

Nikolay Antropov has started playing very rough lately, which I don’t encourage: hockey is a dangerous sport on its own — why make it even more dangerous. Other than that, Antropov plays very well, but I think he isn’t the player who can really start a very good attack (unlike Blake), but someone who can successfully finish it or boost it up. I don’t understand why I stopped seeing him in front of the net on the attacks — he now is there quite a lot more rare!

The last two games, Andrew Raycroft had to step up as a goalie, for Vesa Toskala had an small injury and was recovering. No hard feelings taken, but Raycroft is not an NHL player. He almost never catches the puck, but rather always rebounds it! All the time: rebound, rebound, rebound… And, of course, Toronto pays for these rebounds hard time — each time Raycroft does this ugly thing, the forwards surely take the opportunity to finish the play and they do. This way, Toronto lost in the overtime on Wednesday against the New York Islanders: in the overtime (with a rule of a golden goal or “sudden death” as they call it), Islanders attack, shoot on goal right at Raycroft, there’s a rebound, the same player shoots again and finishes the play and hence the game. And this is just one example.

All in all, what I think that Toronto really needs is to understand that passing around during an attack (especially during their power play) isn’t going to get the puck into the goal, whatsoever. If combinations don’t work, try just simply shooting on goal really hard and really sudden. All the combinations must be completely learnt and rehearsed, but at home, not during a match.

To conclude, I think all of this disaster in great amount lies on the shoulders of the head coach, Paul Maurice. The reason I am saying this is that most of the players are excellent if not brilliant: Mats Sundin, Nikolay Antropov, Jason Blake, Vesa Toskala, Thomas Kaberle — just to name a few. But they just can’t get the play going together as a team; there aren’t any combinations, there’s isn’t any well rehearsed play, there isn’t any necessary change of tactics during a game. On that last point, a remark shall follow. A lot of the games follow the same routine: Toronto starts the game as a dominating team, but then slowly the domination is pulled over to the other side. Why? Because the coach of the against team carefully looks at Toronto’s play and makes all the necessary corrections to his team’s tactics. We don’t see anything of this sort in Toronto’s performance. I don’t want to say that Paul Maurice needs to leave his position as a head coach, but if the team will continue performs as it does right now, then I think he will have to.

Sadly, I will be greatly and pleasantly surprised if the Toronto Maple Leafs will make the playoffs this season. Let’s hope they’ll do something about their play.

Go, Leafs! Go!

Some News from My Headline

My exam session has successfully ended. Now I can share some of the thoughts that I wanted to share during, but lacked the time to.

First of all, I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas (one on 25th December), which is very fast approaching, and a very Happy New Year, which is, in fact, approaching just as fast (at a rate of one second per second — I guess that should be correct, yes), finishing up with an orthodox Christmas (one on 7th January)!

Second of all, in the following few days I will be slightly modifying my website, adding some more information and reorganising it a little bit. So you might want to check it out later, too.

Third of all, I have just (that is, a few minutes ago) figured out that Moldavian Airport should really consider redeveloping their website (here). It’s true, the website looks extremely well done and beautiful, but it has just taken me some 6.5 minutes to load the front page, where I was able to browse for another 20-25 seconds, which was followed by website’s “internal error”, such that I had to reload the front page (another 5-6 minutes). At this, my internet is actually very fast (it really is). I think this is mostly because the website is at .md, while I am here in rain-snowy Toronto, but I still have hard time believing that that is the reason for those 6 minutes of wait. Moreover, even if that is so, then they should consider a “non-flash version” available.

I had had hard time believing that web designers would read this post, so I wrote them a feedback. I really do hope they will make a not of that, do you think?

Fourth of all, I had a pleasure of seeing the performance of the St. Petersburg State Ballet on Ice that had been visiting Toronto for the last four or five days (today was the last performance), with their Sleeping Beauty on Ice. My feedback will follow shortly. More information here. Here is a short YouTube video (Show One Production copyright) with some of the shots from the show.
Update: You can find my review here.

Fifth of all, in addition to the “fourth of all” point, a month or so ago I also had a chance to listen to the performance of Dmitry Hvorostovsky, the feedback on which shall also follow shortly. Here is a short YouTube video (Show One Production copyright, once again).
Update: you can find my review here.

Sixth of all, the Toronto Maple Leafs aren’t doing very well lately, even though they won yesterday night’s game at Florida. Yet again, details will follow next.
Update: Here is my discussion on what’s wrong with Maple Leafs’ play.

Seventh of all, I have had a chance to listen to new piece by a new young Ukranian (Russian? Canadian? Soviet?) composer, Eugene Astapov. Details follow.
Update: From our conversation, Eugene confirmed that he is indeed a Russian-Canadian composer. He insisted on being called thus :)
Update: My review can be found here.

… There’s more to come :)