I am not Brian Burke’s biggest fan, but you have to admire him for not sitting on a bad thing and admire him for being very aggressive in trying to tackle the problem that is the modern day Toronto Maple Leafs. Burke has threatened changes from the get-go but as time went on the threats to send veterans to the minors and make trades appeared to be looking like idle threats until Sunday when Burke pulled the pin on a grenade and lobbed it into the Leafs dressing room blowing it to pieces.

By the time the dust settled a staggering 30% of the teams line-up had gone and three good players plus a prospect had come back in. Tonight they will take to the line-up for the first time and everyone will anxiously tune in to see what happens.

I don’t expect a miracle, I certainly don’t expect the Leafs to soar up the standings but something had to change and overall, while losing Ian White isn’t easy (he’s having a better year than Phaneuf), the Leafs have improved to a degree. I say degree because they are now left desperately short in the forward position but can now look at young players and see what forward positions they need to address in the off season. Actually, Burke said he isn’t done trading some some of those positions could yet be finished by trading out some defensemen, a position the Leafs can trim down on.

If only Liverpool, my beloved Liverpool Football Club, could address their own problems and lack of talent un-worty of wearing the Red shirt in a similar way to the Leafs. To many times this season I have watched them fall well short of standards and wished Benitez had the guts to ditch 30% of the line-up. Sure we haven’t the money to buy but we could certainly sell and buy in replacements, perhaps even give some younger players a run out who actually want to be there. But then, that’s a rant for another day.

It was almost like they wanted to achieve the goal of moving back into their comfort zone — last place — against the Carolina Hurricanes — the team in last place going into tonight’s match-up. The Leafs blew a 3-0 lead in the first period to see a 4-4 game into the final minutes of play. But an Ian White goal with 30-seconds to go seemed to save their bacon only for the Leafs, in only a way the 2009/10 Leafs can, conceded a goal with 2.7 seconds on the clock to take it to overtime. Not content with actually winning a game in regulation the Leafs decided to give their opponent at least a point. Well as it turned out it was the Leafs that took just one point, again, when Carolina won the shootout. The result moves the Leafs back into last place in the 30 team NHL standings and attention now turns to the management.

Before the game GM Brian Burke threw out threats for the 812th time that players would be demoted or traded if they didn’t step up. Well after tonight’s shambles in blowing the 3-0 lead against the former worst team in the NHL, it’ll be interesting to see if Burke follows through on the threats finally.

When I turned the game on to see them 3-0 up I went onto Twitter and wrote something to the effect of the Leafs would win the Stanley Cup if the only team they had to play was Carolina, but as it turns out I was to quick with such a comment and it seems under such circumstances of a two-team league with Carolina, the Leafs would indeed still come up short.

At the time of writing it now seems that this won’t happen, but a few hours ago the news people revealed to us that Toronto Maple Leafs GM, Brian Burke was hoping to bring an outdoor game to BMO Field in Toronto, the home of TFC. While some media people might not have liked the idea for many reasons including the small attendance it would draw (not a heck of a lot more than the ACC), I liked the idea. So it wouldn’t bring in much more than the ACC, but so what. Where are you going to play this potential outdoor game anyway? Yep, the ACC like the other 40 home games in a season. I don’t understand why there only has to be one outdoor game per year … I know the NHL wants to keep the novelty factor but if two teams agree on it, what is to stop a team doing it as much as it wants and whenever it wants? Will we ever see the day when a team builds an arena with a retractable roof for its own outdoor games when it feels like it?

Brian Burke confused a lot of people last night by revealing that young Nazem Kadri was the guy he wanted all along and not superstar in the making John Tavares, leaving the Toronto media scrambling on the Internet to find out just who exactly they would be writing about for this mornings papers when they seemed sure it would be John Tavares. For months we had been lead to believe that the dream was to move up in the draft to pick Tavares and for months leading into the draft, Leafs GM Brian Burke was saying that was exactly his plan, but when it came to the crunch he called Kadri to the stage as the Leafs new hot prospect. Burke of course was trying to make Kardi feel wanted but he would have saved himself from looking like a fool had he just kept quiet with the media back at the draft lottery all them months ago. I could see then that it would be a costly (in terms of players they would have to give up) mistake to try move up for one hot prospect in Tavares and one that was very unlikely to happen.

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