There’s a saying in journalism: you don’t pull for the team, you pull for the story.

Sometimes, more often than you think, you pull for the guy.

So it is with former Leaf John Mitchell, whose faceoff win  led to the Rangers game-winning goal in Game 5 of their playoff with Washington.

You’d have to go a long way to find a kinder guy than John Mitchell, a kid from Oakville so universally liked that anyone who so much as walked by him would wish him well.

You might however find one in the ...

Twenty-one-year-old Nazem Kadri is a Marlie with 50 games of NHL experience.

They are an odd group, your Toronto Marlies.

They are young but play like veterans. The Marlies have won five of six American Hockey League playoff games.

Nazem Kadri is 21 years old. He has played 50 NHL games.

Jake Gardiner turns 22 on July 4th. He played 75 Leafs games this season.

Matt Frattin is 24. He played 57 NHL games and has scored 18 goals in 29 Marlie playoff and regular season games.

“We feel a part of something big,” said ...

Ben Scrivens stopped 27 of 28 shots as the Marlies downed Abbotsford 5-1 to even their playoff series at a game each.

You’ve probably heard all about the Marlies excellent young defenceman.

His name is Korbinian Holzer.

Oh, you thought I was talking about the other guy.

Last night, and throughout the Marlies five playoff games, the other guy has been Jake Gardiner.

Holzer scored once and set up another with a rocket drive that ricocheted off Abbotsford goalie Danny Taylor. Holzer along with partner Mark Fraser made the Marlies’ end failsafe as the ...

Jesse Blacker, seen here during a Leafs exhibition game, has brought excellent skating and rabid enthusiasm to his first Marlies season.

This is what the playoffs are like.

An upper body injury meant Jesse Blacker hadn’t played since March 31 when he took the ice for Game 1 of the Marlies playoff against the Abbotsford Heat at Ricoh.

Late in the first period the rookie defenceman tried to beat a man near his own blue line.

The puck stayed in, a wild sequence ensued and the Marlies never got the puck back. Another ...

Nicolas Deschamps, shown here as a member of the Chicoutimi Saugeneens, was a prolific junior but he fell off the map in the Anaheim organization.

People talk about it all the time.

A change of scenery, a fresh take, a change is as good as a rest.

So it shouldn’t surprise that a player would rekindle his game in fresh colours.

But if you are going to move, you’d best man-up. Something stopped working and for whatever reason, that something was you.

Which brings us neatly to Nicolas Deschamps, a pleasant surprise for the ...

Whether it be with the Marlies or with Team USA, Jerry D'Amigo has shown he can score big goals and deliver a solid all-around game.

Jerry D’Amigo, the owner of five goals in the Marlies three-game sweep of the Rochester Americans, has been on a goalscoring run before.

The first came at the 2010 World Juniors where he scored six goals and added six helpers in half a dozen games for Team USA.

Last season with the Kitchener Rangers D’Amigo scored six goals and added three more assists in seven playoff games.

D’Amigo, ...

Note: While an employee at MLSE I have absolutely no idea whether the Maple Leafs will pursue Roberto Luongo. This post is a reasonable and hopefully reasoned guess. Anywhoo…

I have this great idea about marriage.

There should be a no-fault window for separation every five years; sort of a renegotiation where you can look at the Missus and say ‘up for another five?’

What the Leafs need to consider about Roberto Luongo is whether they want to be married to him for the rest of his playing life. How long he wants ...

Less than a year after Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke selected him in the first round of the NHL draft, defenceman Stuart Percy is logging big playoff minutes with the Toronto Marlies.

They call it the imposter syndrome.

It afflicts most everyone. The more you think about something the more unreal it feels when you get it.

Which brings us nicely to defenceman Stuart Percy, just 18, and drafted 25th overall by the Maple Leafs last June? A concussion meant a speed bump this season in junior but in 150 games with ...

Joe Colborne, shown here in a November game with the Maple Leafs against Washington, is looking to reclaim the momentum that made him the AHL's player of the month in October. Colborne had two assists as the Marlies won their AHL payoff opener 4-3 over the Rochester Americans.

Over the last five years Joe Colborne has scored 130 goals. If you did that over a week your arms would get tired.

He has scored all kinds of goals with all kinds of people. He has scored in the Alberta Junior ...

It began, as these stories always do, in a small Bavarian town known by a name I will not attempt to spell. A decade ago, Korbinian Holzer faced Marcel Mueller for the first time.

As 14-year-olds the two future Marlies met and pretty well instantly became estranged at a tournament in their native Germany. “He was the biggest defenceman and I was among the biggest forwards so we saw a lot of each other,” Mueller said Tuesday.

For lack of a snappier name, the two are known locally as The ...

By any measure, especially his own, Leafs’ GM Brian Burke did not have a good year.

But in one element, Burke has been in front of the curve.

Big and bad is the new black.

In January, Burke reluctantly sent Colton Orr to the minors and publicly fretted the era of the fighter was over.

At the Leafs season-ending press conference Burke stressed the need to be bigger and stronger. “We need to address the size of the group and the compete level of the group,” he said.

“I like teams that go into buildings ...

The kind of playoff moment a player will remember. Marlies coach Dallas Eakins, then a defenceman with the New York Rangers sends Eric Lindros into the Rangers' bench in a 1997 playoff game.

Dallas Eakins remembers the moment if he can’t quite place the date.

It was 1992 and the Marlies coach was in the second year a 15-year playing career that would see him manage 120 games in the NHL. He would touch down in 10 different American and International League towns: Baltimore, Binghamton, Chicago, Cincinnati, New Haven, Moncton, Winnipeg, ...

 
Jake Gardiner isn’t quite done yet.

The 21-year-old defenceman has settled in with the Toronto Marlies as they finish their regular season with games in Abbotsford B.C. against the Heat, Friday and Sunday.

Leaf rookies Gardiner, Carter Ashton and Matt Frattin will contest their first pro playoff next week.

Mapleleafs.com writer Mike Ulmer caught up with Gardiner to get his view on his season with the Leafs and his upcoming playoff with the Marlies.

Mike Ulmer: You led all rookie defencemen with 30 points and were third in ice time for first-year defencemen. Now ...

Ryan Murray might be the wild card of the 2012 NHL entry draft

We now know the Leafs are scheduled to draft fifth in the June entry draft.

The next question is who will be available.

The Oilers are long shots to trade their first overall. There isn’t the depth of quality in the draft that would prompt the Oilers to trade down.  Sarnia Sting winger Nail Yakupov (42 games, 31 goals, 38 assists, 69 points, 30 PIMs) is the stand-alone choice in the draft.

To get the skinny on this year’s player ...

What does the organization owe this man?

To The Citizens of Leafs Nation:

Your ardour has sometimes moved me past words.  You help pay my mortgage. When you cheer so earnestly as your team beats Tampa in the last home date of the season there isn’t much good in human nature I would not ascribe to you.

I love the fact that the parking lot attendant and the guys in the dressing room for Sunday night hockey have pithy jabs and exasperated complaints at the ready.

Sometimes I wonder if you are a ...

A few moments after this picture was taken James Reimer's season would be knocked into freefall.

The Toronto Maple Leafs aren’t in the playoffs because their goaltending wasn’t very good.

It isn’t a whole lot more complicated than that.

Now, there are contributing factors by the boatload but what you need to know is that when the club went into the abyss in February they surrendered the opening two goals in five straight loses. In the sixth they blew a 3-1 lead and fell 5-4 to Chicago, February 29.

The players who ambled ...

Remember the happy times…

In horseracing they call it going dark but of course, dark speaks to so much more than not playing when discussing the layoff facing the Maple Leafs.

The kick-off to the Leafs off-season, if there can be such a thing, comes Monday when players clean out their lockers and take one final sift through the rubble of the campaign.

The gap between the clear-out and the June 22 entry draft is 69 sleeps. This is when most of the healing happens. A week after the playoff puck-drop only ...

You'd best get used to seeing Ben Scrivens in goal. Finding a netminder looms as the Leafs biggest off-season challenge.

The distance between the Maple Leafs and genuine contenders is clear enough.

They are in the bottom half dozen or so in the league. I get that.

What is harder to articulate is a plan to make things better.

Not to worry.  Nobody asked but here is a recipe to get the team into the playoffs next year and set them up, in the words of the estimable Brian Burke, to bloody someone’s ...

As always, the smartest guy in the room.

Draft Schmaft – An essay.

I was about five feet away from Cliff Fletcher when he broached an idea so radical it damn near sucked the oxygen out of Maple Leaf Gardens.

“Draft Schmaft.”

It was 1996. The notion that tying a team’s fortunes exclusively to the entry draft might be a questionable strategy propelled Cliff’s musing into the realm of legend. That, more than any argument I can muster, speaks to the orthodoxy that positions the draft as vital to individual teams and the ...

Paul Henderson found the purpose of his life after reaching the Summit.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,” wrote the poet Dylan Thomas. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Sitting in a medical centre with an intravenous line in his arm and cellphone in hand, Paul Henderson is doing just that.

With pockets of cancer all over his body and infecting his blood, the hero of the 1972 Summit Series sees his life with a new immediacy and clarity. Over the next month or so he will begin ...