Under the leadership of Brian Burke it seems as if the Toronto Maple Leafs are improving on weaknesses and building on strenghts as this season’s record shows.
If the Toronto Maple Leafs’ start to the regular season continues, it’s as safe to say that they will quickly take up much of the city’s attention span. The re-vamped Leafs have looked strong in all of their weak spots from last season, and have only built upon last year’s strengths.
General Manager Brian Burke, who some fans have taken to calling The Pope (presumably in reference to a metaphor he used during his introductory news conference, comparing the Leafs to the Vatican of hockey) finally has the clean slate he has so dearly desired since taking the reins.
Burke was faced with painful long-term player contracts that he inherited from his predecessors when he came onboard, but with most of those finally off the books he used this off-season to ensure that the club that hit the ice this October could have its players who predated Burke’s tenure counted on one hand.
Things are looking awfully rosy for the Leafs right now, and there’s no reason to think they couldn’t get far, far rosier as the season rolls along
The talk of the town in a lot of corners is the long anticipated, and equally impressive, new complex that the Leafs corporate generals have constructed adjacent to the Air Canada Centre known as Maple Leafs Square. It includes luxury condominiums, a Longo’s grocery store, and a dazzling sports bar known appropriately as Real Sports.
The bar is one that any fan must at some point check out. Its reviews have been as rave as its lines are long, and its beer collection makes even the proudest sports fan’s beer fridge look inadequate. Add in a two-story HD TV and it’s easy to forgive, at least a little bit, the Leafs’ corporate bosses for the last 40 years of… well, whatever it was.
Of course, the complex as a whole is proof of the tremendous health of the Maple Leafs’ empire. It has been ever since its inception as an architectural drawing.
Now, given his own chance to draw on a blank sheet of paper, Brian Burke’s architectural drawing is starting to look not so bad after all.
Whether or not the Leafs’ on ice product will match its corporate backers’ heights remains to be seen, but early indications say that the day could come sooner than anyone would have bet on a few short weeks ago.
