Playoffs: whom to cheer, whom to jeer

[FMichael]

Off the glass? That was a set play off the boards. A display of home ice advantage we use to do with our springy boards.

Set play?

Guess that's what I get for having boomer-eyes and watching the game on my iPhone while charting patient care at work

Even more impressed that the Bruins pulled that off in OT!

 

[OldnotDeadWings]

No sympathy at all for most Leafs fans other than a "too bad, so sad". I lived around and in Toronto immediately before and then through the early years of Harold Ballard's ownership of the team. If you took the worst attributes of James Dolan, George Steinbrenner and Jerry Jones, you'd have an owner only half as bad as Ballard was. I had a few encounters with him in the course of my then young career and they were never anything but extremely unpleasant.

I half-liked the old 60s Leafs with their core of quiet and mostly admirable players, and then the early Sittler-McDonald teams. I had a HS classmate who was drafted by and played for the Leafs at that time, went to dozens of games at Maple Leaf Gardens, NHL and the Marlies. MLG was a shrine in those times and I lived just a few blocks away, camped outside overnight for a ticket to Game 2 of the original Canada-Russia series, saw Mark Howe and Gainey playing Junior there. Ballard ruined all of that, letting the arena slide and didn't care about the teams in it, just how much money he could make and how many people he could piss off. The stench he left remains because the longer the fans were removed from what worked in the 60s, the more insufferable they became.

If you had told a Leafs fan in 1972, when Ballard took full control of the team after getting out of jail for tax fraud, what was to come soon and would continue over the next half-century and more, they would have thought you were on acid. Of course there are many, hundreds of thousands if not millions, of Leafs fans no different than any other fan-base and have no higher opinion of Ballard than I do. Too bad. I am quite happy to see them lose year after year after year.