Kin
New member
Anyone else kind of think the Leafs are painting themselves into a bit of a corner with the whole captaincy thing?
To my mind, there are two perfectly valid ways to look at giving a player a C. They are:
1) Captains probably don't matter much but it's hockey tradition so we might as well give it to someone.
2) Captains probably don't matter much and hockey tradition is stupid so we may or may not give it to someone.
But lately it seems as though Dubas, in his quest to prove to everyone that he's not an animated adding machine but a real live hockey scouting boy, wants to be going down some middle road. One where the Captaincy, and particularly the captaincy of the TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS, is in fact a very big deal and that's why they have to take their time with the decision because otherwise you might give it to the wrong person and then who knows how many cups you won't win over the next 50 years.
The problem I see there, outside of it being kind of dumb, is that the more you pump the tires of it being a big decision the more you make it something that someone could potentially be sore about not getting. An extended audition process where only one person gets to win The Maple Leafs' Got Talent. It seems to me like a better strategy would be to just sack up and cast your lot with someone.
Or, alternately, if that's too far too slapdash and you really need to take your time to decide who gets to wear which additional piece of felt on their jersey...maybe have a placeholder? Someone respected, still contributing maybe but old enough so that they won't be around for much longer and so the long term question of who is Maple Leafs Primus inter pares can be kicked down the road for a year or two at absolute most. I mean, if only the Leafs had someone like that who they overpaid to be here.
Because, ultimately, does anyone still really care about this stuff? When anyone is looking over the tragic failure of the Phaneuf years does anyone really attribute any substantial portion of that failure to the fact that they can nominally be called the Phaneuf years in the first place?
I'm all for Dubas winning us Cups via disrupting the podcasting paradigm or whatever but it seems like this would be right up his alley of being an easy problem to solve, where the dopes who thinks it matters get fed a pile of slop and the people who don't can continue working on mapping out a quantifiable Leadership algorithm.
To my mind, there are two perfectly valid ways to look at giving a player a C. They are:
1) Captains probably don't matter much but it's hockey tradition so we might as well give it to someone.
2) Captains probably don't matter much and hockey tradition is stupid so we may or may not give it to someone.
But lately it seems as though Dubas, in his quest to prove to everyone that he's not an animated adding machine but a real live hockey scouting boy, wants to be going down some middle road. One where the Captaincy, and particularly the captaincy of the TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS, is in fact a very big deal and that's why they have to take their time with the decision because otherwise you might give it to the wrong person and then who knows how many cups you won't win over the next 50 years.
The problem I see there, outside of it being kind of dumb, is that the more you pump the tires of it being a big decision the more you make it something that someone could potentially be sore about not getting. An extended audition process where only one person gets to win The Maple Leafs' Got Talent. It seems to me like a better strategy would be to just sack up and cast your lot with someone.
Or, alternately, if that's too far too slapdash and you really need to take your time to decide who gets to wear which additional piece of felt on their jersey...maybe have a placeholder? Someone respected, still contributing maybe but old enough so that they won't be around for much longer and so the long term question of who is Maple Leafs Primus inter pares can be kicked down the road for a year or two at absolute most. I mean, if only the Leafs had someone like that who they overpaid to be here.
Because, ultimately, does anyone still really care about this stuff? When anyone is looking over the tragic failure of the Phaneuf years does anyone really attribute any substantial portion of that failure to the fact that they can nominally be called the Phaneuf years in the first place?
I'm all for Dubas winning us Cups via disrupting the podcasting paradigm or whatever but it seems like this would be right up his alley of being an easy problem to solve, where the dopes who thinks it matters get fed a pile of slop and the people who don't can continue working on mapping out a quantifiable Leadership algorithm.
