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Leafs booed off ice in loss to Oilers By TERRY KOSHAN, QMI Agency
TORONTO - Fans who showed up at the Air Canada Centre on Thursday night just wanted a glimpse of the future.
Something, anything, to give them hope.
The odd guy wearing an Edmonton Oilers sweater couldn’t have asked for more.
Maple Leafs supporters? Well, the constant hand-wringing over what’s exactly in store for the franchise certainly didn’t subside.
Booed off the ice, the brutal Leafs eventually lost 5-0 to the Oilers, a club that should have been road-weary after winning the night before in Montreal.
And so what if the Oilers’ kids can’t play defence to save their lives? With speed and smarts, they made the older Leafs, especially veteran defencemen Tomas Kaberle and Francois Beauchemin, look like they had just started taking up the game.
Leafs coach Ron Wilson said on Thursday that he knew it would be a fast game and that the Leafs would be prepared for it. Theory fell drastically short of practice.
While Taylor Hall, who had two goals, and Jordan Eberle lit up the home side, Edmonton goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin turned the clock back to the spring of 2004, when he was stellar in the Tampa Bay Lightning’s run to a Stanley Cup.
Khabibulin, sporting horrible statistics before the game started, squeezed the confidence out of Leafs rookie Nazem Kadri, who has played in nine games this season and has not yet scored. Khabibulin got the best of Kadri in tight a couple of minutes in, and then stoned John Mitchell on a 2-on-1.
Eberle, at 3:10 of the first period, gave the Oilers a 1-0 lead when he skipped past Kaberle and beat goalie Jonas Gustavsson with a wrist shot that the Swede should have stopped.
It got worse.
Khabibulin got a pad on a Fred Sjostrom slapshot, and then Clarke MacArthur waited too long to move the puck on an odd-man break as defenceman Theo Peckham broke up the play.
Mitchell was thwarted by Khabibulin after a Dustin Penner giveaway early in the second period.
Soon after, Hall, who has helped give fans back in the Alberta capital true optimism, caught Beauchemin flat-footed at the Toronto blue line. The 19-year-old, in a flash, ended Gustavsson’s night as he scooted in and scored on a backhand.
Gustavsson was gone in favour of Jean-Sebastien Giguere after allowing two goals on six shots. Incidentally, neither Kaberle not Beauchemin was strapped to the bench for the rest of the night.
Kadri nearly scored on a wraparound, but Khabibulin shoved his body across the crease to keep the puck from going over the goal line.
Any thoughts of a third-period comeback for the Leafs were blunted when the Oilers scored with three seconds remaining in the second.
Sam Gagner, another of the Oilers who doesn’t need to shave more than once or twice a week, buried a rebound as Giguere tried unsuccessfully to cover up. Kaberle weakly tried to argue that his goalie did indeed have the puck trapped. He should have been worried more about why he didn’t square himself to Gagner and keep him from getting his stick on the puck.
Hall and Ryan Jones scored late in the third period, further enraging those who started a “Fire Wilson!” chant earlier in the game.
That the Leafs can’t finish is nothing new. They outshot the Oilers, who won all three games on their trip that included stops in Ottawa and Montreal, 33-19.
For those who worry about such things, the Leafs have been shut out in six games after they were blanked four times all of last season. Is it too late to get Matt Stajan or Niklas Hagman back?
The Leafs have lost four in a row and five of their past six. The Oilers, meanwhile, flew home with the knowledge they moved past Toronto in the overall standings, leaving the Leafs in 28th place.
Members of Leafs Nation appear to be getting fed up. Announced attendance was 19,465, but empty seats dotted the lower bowl for the entire game.
