Sharpen your pitchforks .... I've seen enough

I have never, not once in my too-many-to-count-and-be-depressed-about years as a leafs fan, joined ranks with the pitchforking mob out for a coach's head as soon as the team starts losing. I think it's easy scapegoating, an uneducated fan's way of calling for change, and that 90% of the times when a head coach is given the ax, it's about sending a message to both the players and the fans that losing isn't tolerated, more than it's about cutting out the cancer. For Ron Wilson, however, I make an exception.

He is a poor decision maker, who lets his pride get in the way of deviating from his (as yet unproven) coaching style. Brian Burke built this team around the blue line, and so one would expect that our head coach would implement a system of play that emphasizes our defensive strengths. Wilson, however, appears to be pushing an offensively-minded system that employs wide open forechecking and constant puck cycling - strategies of play that are completely unsuited to our young, and largely talentless, forwards.

He also makes incredibly questionable calls during games, with last night's shootout loss to Buffalo proving the most recent example. Up by only a goal, with 30 seconds left in the third, and facing a Buffalo squad that was picking up momentum, had a sixth man on the ice and was desperate to quell their own media storm back home, Ron Wilson decides to man the gates with the FOURTH line. It was a thoughtless, unjustifiably arrogant underestimation of the Sabres - a complete miscalculation. And it ended up costing us the game.

It also blows my mind that Brian Burke is publicly lambasting the Leafs fanbase as "disgraceful" for booing Phaneuf so early in the season, when Ron Wilson spews verbal diarrhea at the media at every opportunity. It's like the slightly too aggressive Timbits player with the overly involved mother screaming obscenities from the sidelines - How can we blame the impressionable child with an example like that? Last night's press conference featured Ron Wilson making AIR QUOTES when talking about his first line. I suppose this was his completely mature way of criticizing the first line's floundering production, but it's also rich coming from the man who kept Luca Caputi on that same first line for the majority of their lackluster game against the Senators.

The Leafs have only two more points than they did this time last year. Our special teams are once again biting the big one, and our goal production, particularly from the center position, is atrocious. What has kept me watching the games this year has been the heart with which these boys have been playing with. They are fast, and they are gritty, and they are try-hards who will fight in the corners, throw themselves in front of pucks, and scramble for those lucky bounces. This is vastly different from last year, and I believe has proven to be the difference-maker in games that we might have otherwise lost. The heart and the motivation to have their fledgling talent cultivated is there - What we need is a "head coach" who isn't working against them, who doesn't throw them under the bus at every opportunity.

Remember 1998? No one thought the Leafs would make the playoffs at the start of that season. They were a seemingly talentless team of unknowns, backed by a goaltender (you may remember him... Curtis Joseph?) who was criticized as being past his prime, captained by Mats Sundin, a man that no one quite trusted after the Gilmour/Clark eras, coming out of back-to-back seasons of missing the playoffs. Sound familiar? The Leafs went on to make Conference Finals that year, under new head coach Pat Quinn.

What we need is Pat Quinn after Mike Murphy. Ron Wilson needs to go.