While we're doing "revisionism", Roberts led the Leafs in goals in his first year with the team, and watched his previous year's point total from Carolina. As someone who was very much alive in 2001, the general feeling was that the Leafs had gone one-for-two with their big free agent signings.
Roberts was seen as a great signing because of what he did in those playoff years with the Leafs. We eventually came to appreciate his regular season play too, but not until after the 2001 playoffs. The question before the 2001 playoffs was whether a 34 year old Roberts was too old and banged up to make an impact on the playoffs. He recently missed an entire year to injury. He was long past his prime Calgary years.
While there was some initial joy over his and Corson’s signings in the summer of 2000, that was only because they were the “best” available UFAs in a weak UFA class, and their paltry $2-2.5 million annual salaries reflected that. There was no UFA Curtis Joseph that year, no UFA Mogilny or UFA Roenick. The real stars and difference makers. Roberts and Corson were the best of a lowly bunch, they were from Toronto, and the Leafs needed grit after a thrashing by the Devils the year earlier. So might as well sign them. But did they have any skill?
Roberts was in fact seen as a reason why the Leafs fell in the standings in 2000-2001. The Leafs were too old and too slow, it seemed. Steve Thomas had suddenly regressed, though not surprising for a 37 year old. Gone were their promising youth of 1-2 years ago, and the remaining youth they did have in Nikolai Antripov seemed to stop developing. The rest of the team was coined to be a mess. Jonas Hoglund was Mats Sundin’s backpack, Darcy Tucker was Sideshow Bob, and Corson was seen as no better. An old Roberts with a banged up body himself was seen as an epitome of why the Leafs took a step back in 2001.
I hope you’re not suggesting the Leafs and everyone else knew they had a playoff warrior in Roberts on the eve of the 2001 playoffs who was capable of being a series difference maker against powerhouse Ottawa. With the benefit of hindsight, we all know Roberts rekindled his reputation as a playoff warrior, and his reputation for taking care of his body as an old man was so wonderful that he cashed in on his time in Toronto by making a career out of this reputation post-NHL. We also all know now that the early 2000’s Senators were abysmal failures, gutless, soft, the very opposite of what a playoff team in the early 2000’s should look like. A beating by the same team year after year after year after year will make that clear. But there was nothing to suggest any of this at the time.
I don’t doubt many of you were alive in 2001, but many of your responses here suggest you didn’t “live” 2001, didn’t watch the Leafs and/or Sens game after game that year, didn’t follow the team mood day after day. And if you did, all of that appears to be long forgotten, and understandably so. A neutral observer has no reason to remember those days and that series, and a Senators fan wishes to actively forget. Your responses suggest something akin to a historian looking at old data of the Peloponnesian War, and then piecing together a puzzle forcefully until you have a narrative that explains the overall present-day reputation of the past Greek armies.