Leafs' Playoffs: A Game Plan for the Suits

Here in Toronto very few regular fans can attend playoff games. Only the wealthy, the "suits", can afford tickets. The ordinary ruffians who make up the bulk of Toronto fans are therefore not seen or more importantly, not HEARD at Leaf playoff games.

This means that the Leafs, at home, are always battling a "home ice disadvantage" during the playoffs.

One of the things that thugs who make up the bulk of the Leaf fan base have long understood is that a home game gives them the opportunity to vent their numerous frustrations on a group of visiting millionaires.

This is something that would never occur to a Toronto suit who is attending a playoff game. The suit is there to see and be seen. He is there to tuck into the shrimp platter in a corporate booth and to spot hot looking wives and girlfriends in the crowd.

If the Leafs score, he will cheer lustily, because it is de rigueur to do so. He doesn't mind cheering. It's part of the game. And it's only for a few nights at most, so what the hell.

This isn't good enough. The rest of the city expects more. Toronto knows that everyone cannot attend the game and the team's most important fans, the vulgar, for the most part, will not be attending the game. Consequently, in Toronto, every important game especially a playoff game, is an occasion when not only is the team judged but Toronto's suits are judged.

Usually they are found wanting. Let's face it, Toronto has lousy suits and always has had lousy suits.

In the movie "Body Heat", Richard Crenna plays a "developer" with mob connections. (What could be more Toronto?) This is a suit who makes it clear to the loser lawyer played by William Hurt, that he is willing to ". . . do what it takes . . . whatever it takes" to achieve his objectives.

The problem Toronto has, from a motivational point of view, is how to turn Toronto's fat cats who have everything, into lean ravening wolves at the Rogers Center, eager for victory and for the opportunity to rain vituperation down upon the visiting team.

If I were coaching the suits in this game, I would play a coach type head game with them. I would tell them to think of every frustration that they have to endure at the office. I would tell them to think of every employee they would like to tear a strip off or frog march out of the building. I would remind them of the good old days in the Roman galleys, when a ship owner could flog more speed out of his slaves or catapult "greek fire" into the rigging of an enemy galley before clambering aboard and cutting everybody's throat.

Get the wheels turning suits! Boot Bruin Butt!

I get what you're saying I'm a huge blackhawks fan, that lived in Dallas for about 15 years... Lets just say the energies of the two stadiums were TOTALLY different.. Stars game were meh, sub par. Hawks games, Bat SH*T crazy

Originally posted by ipsedixit

The problem Toronto has, from a motivational point of view, is how to turn Toronto's fat cats who have everything, into lean ravening wolves at the Rogers Center, eager for victory and for the opportunity to rain vituperation down upon the visiting team.

Get the wheels turning suits! Boot Bruin Butt!

edit on 8-5-2013 by ipsedixit because: (no reason given)

edit on 8-5-2013 by ipsedixit because: (no reason given)

This is the problem with sports nowadays. A good number (I won't say all or most) of fat-cat fans showing up for games do so not out of their personal loyalty to the team as a fan, rather they do it for the prestige that is associated with attending. Celebrity sightings are rampant at NBA games, and I suspect the only reason a good number of them show up is for the photo op. Hell, even some owners don't give a damn if their team wins or loses...as long as they are making money. See Jeff Loria (killed baseball in Montreal and doing the same garbage in Miami). The hardest thing to endure as a sports fan is if you are a fan of a team that just doesn't care about fielding a good product.

And furthermore . . .

Heckling With Extreme Prejudice: A Primer for the Conscientious Suit

The key to heckling is being heard. If you are not heard, it doesn't matter what you say. Heckling is like syncopation in music. It is a note sounded off the beat.

Wait for a lull and then pick a player on the enemy team who is not one of their strong performers. If he makes a clearing pass, shout, "Way to go (insert player name here)!"

You do this a few times so that he hears your voice and opens the doors to his tiny little brain, the better to hear your words of admiration. You and he can then develop a symbiotic relationship.

Great hecklers are like fifth columnists. A great heckler is like a sociopath who is a member of the enemy team. It is his job to praise inconsequential deeds done by the enemy players, pretending to be on their side, while he waits for important plays and sows the seeds of doubt in his victim.

"Here comes the pass (insert player name)!" "Don't fan on it!"

When the targeted player messes something up, the heckler takes umbrage, but as a supporter. "Come on you clown . . . Awwww . . . It's OK. You'll be OK. You've just gotta get your game together."

Etc.

Think of the opposing team as employees you're going to fire anyway.

Originally posted by slapjacks
I get what you're saying I'm a huge blackhawks fan, that lived in Dallas for about 15 years... Lets just say the energies of the two stadiums were TOTALLY different.. Stars game were meh, sub par. Hawks games, Bat SH*T crazy

Exactly, Philadelphia too! And Boston. Toronto's suits are an embarrassment.

Originally posted by FatherStacks
Hell, even some owners don't give a damn if their team wins or loses...as long as they are making money. See Jeff Loria (killed baseball in Montreal and doing the same garbage in Miami). The hardest thing to endure as a sports fan is if you are a fan of a team that just doesn't care about fielding a good product.

Toronto puts a slightly different spin on that. Here in Toronto fat cat hockey airheads are lining up to be the saviour of the team, elbowing people with real smarts out of the way, at least up until recently.

A Scotty Bowman or a Jimmy Devellano wouldn't think of coming to Toronto.

Addendum to the Heckling Primer

The most common mistake made by incompetent hecklers is heckling the opposing team's superstar. That is defensive heckling.

To be really effective hecklers must go on the offense.

Offensive heckling, the kind of heckling that gets you goals, is directed at the enemy team's weaker players. Causing a weaker player to make a turnover or to cough up the puck in an awkward place can lead to scoring chances for your team.

Great hecklers go after the weak players on the opposing team. They operate to assist their own team's forwards.

If the Leafs win tonight, the brotherhood of hecklers will record it as follows:

The Bruins lost in the evening at ten, in the flame
Of the pitch belts. Flushed with the sight of the victory, Leaf fans
Gathered their clans and moved back to North York and the rest,
To wait the next fight against the tribe of the Bruins.

Apologies to E.J. Pratt, author of Brébeuf and His Brethren.

The Bruins have just taken a 3 to 2 lead in the game and I am so pissed off.

OK, MacArthur just tied it up again, but what pisses me off is the modern NHL defenseman. Who outlawed body checking in the NHL?

I'm sick of watching defensemen who don't take the body and who think that their job is to get in the net with the goaltender to be a second goaltender on an enemy rush. WTF?

Boston wins in overtime on a classic modern NHL defense effup by number 23 Ryan O'Byrne, who didn't take the man on the rush and just kept backing up. Thanks Ryan.

People are pinning this on Dionne Phaneuf for causing a turnover, but make no mistake the goat in this is O'Byrne.

I've settled down a little and now I think I probably shouldn't be so hard on Ryan O'Byrne. Coach Carlyle needs to do some work with his defencemen in my opinion. They have to be thinking that option number one on a rush against them is to take the body of the puck carrier out of the play.

The Leafs had several chances to score in overtime but could not bear down in the moment and make it happen. I did like the team effort overall. They skated hard and never gave up.

Phil Kessel had a great game but his inability to cut hard to the net on a rush hurts him as well as the lack of a cold blooded killer instinct at the decisive moment of a scoring chance. He seems to think that he will get his goals if he just keeps generating chances and keeps shooting. It's true, but in the playoffs this approach has to be accompanied by a pinch of methodical brutality in finishing a scoring play.

Coach Carlyle has got a big job ahead of him. It's tough for a team to lose a game in which they played so well and had so many chances to win.

The series is over. Game 7 won in overtime by the Bruins. A very bitter defeat for the Leafs, who were hungry for playoff glory, having been denied it for so long. Unfortunately, their lack of experience in playoff games showed. They blew a 4 to 1 lead in the third period, by tightening up and not continuing to play offensively.

Memo to James Reimer:

If your defencemen are too stupid to move a big screening player out from in front of you, do like goalies of the past have done, slash the bastard and tell him to get off of your lawn.

Next morning.

Last night I felt very bitter about the loss of Game 7. I think the Leafs should have won that game by a good margin. On the bright side, Toronto fans were treated to an excellent playoff run by a team that has missed the playoffs for years. Phil Kessel grew tremendously as a player in this series. By the time it was finished he had become a two way player hungry to win and willing to do what it takes, everywhere on the ice.

James Reimer was a standout. Phaneuf, Kadri, Van Riemsdyk, Franson, MacArthur, Grabovski, Bozak, Kulemin and Lupol were names that one heard over and over in the thick of things and making things happen for the Leafs. The team showed that it can cut it and very nearly took out the 2011 league champions.

Unfortunately, with about five minutes to go in a game that was won, they lost composure and reverted to their seasonal form against the Bruins. If Coach Carlyle failed at all in this series, it was in the closing minutes of Game 7. The coach was not able to settle his players and to make them stick to the form of the previous 55 minutes of the game. He did not seem to have a plan for the pulled goalie situations that allowed the Bruins to score twice and to force sudden death overtime.

These are serious failings and although one could point out defensive lapses like not clearing Chara away from Reimer on the tying goal and lay the blame for that on Leaf defensemen, the crucial difference that cost the Leafs this series in the last few minutes of play, in a monumental collapse, was that the coach did not rise to meet the challenge and settle his players down.