Maple Leafs Overtime Heroes: Todd Gill vs. the Blackhawks

Maple Leafs Overtime Heroes is an ongoing (kind of) series where we'll look back at memorable Leaf playoff overtime goals. Today's goal is Todd Gill's controversial winner against Chicago in game two of their 1994 playoff series.

Ref? Ref! This guy just dropped
Marty McSorley's eyeball in my lap!

The Maple Leafs opened the 1994 playoffs with a first round matchup against the Chicago Blackhawks. That series opened with a surprisingly lopsided 5-1 victory in game one that started with a Wendel Clark goal from the redline and ended with Robert Dirk squirting blood all over the ice thanks to Todd Gill.

Game two wouldn't be so easy. After being embarrassed in the first game, Ed Belfour shut the door in game two. But so did Felix Potvin, and a duel between two of the better goaltenders in the league saw the game still scoreless heading into overtime. Staring down wave after wave of snipers, Potvin and Belfour traded stunning stops, each one better than the last. Neither would blink. Neither would yield. Nobody, it began to seem, was going to find the net on this night.

Then a defensive defenceman scored on a sixty-foot, unscreened, five-hole slapshot.

Wait, what?

Well, I may have left out one little detail. Let's go to the replay.

Read the rest of this post...

Offseason to-do lists from around the NHL

If you're going to ruin some team's long-term
cap situation this summer, raise your hand.

While celebrating Boston Bruin fans may want to pretend otherwise, the 2010-11 season is already a fading memory. The NHL schedule doesn't allow much time for dwelling on the past, and all eyes are already focused on next year.

We're just three days away from the draft and ten days away from the start of free agency. That means that just two weeks from today, almost every NHL team will look significantly different than it does right now. That's good news for the majority of teams who expect to be significantly better next year. But how will they do it?

That's where the offseason to-do list comes in. Many teams have already made a list of their summer priorities and determined a plan of attack. I reached out to sources embedded with several teams, and they revealed some of the strategies they plan to be executing in the weeks and months to come.

Ottawa Senators - Meet with scouts and coaches to prepare an in-depth analysis of the various strengths in Craig Anderson's game; work on a detailed action plan for destroying them.

Toronto Maple Leafs - Remember last year when we signed Clarke MacArthur at a discount and he turned out to be a reliable everyday contributor? Just do that another seven or eight times, and we should have almost four full lines next year.

Montreal Canadiens - Communicate to fans that the bar has been raised, the competition is working harder than ever before, and that a few isolated car-burnings just isn't going to be good enough anymore.

Read the rest of this post...