Opening Night! It's Opening Night!

Get ready, hockey fans: six months of wanton self-flagellation begins tonight in Detroit!

Happily, the Toronto Maple Leafs won’t be breaking many hearts this year: they’re simply not good enough. Barring a miracle, they’ll miss the playoffs for a fourth consecutive year (which—considering the team had never missed three consecutive playoffs until last year—is noteworthy). Their problems are myriad—but they start with an apparent dearth of firepower. Mats Sundin is still A.W.O.L., and no one seems poised (or capable) of picking up his scoring slack. Jason Blake should be more productive (and, to be fair, he had way more important things to worry about last year), but to quote an infamous Guardian comment about Manchester United: "Where are the goals going to come from?" (For what it’s worth, that comment came prior to the 2006/07 Premier League season—which Manchester United won, all the while scoring more goals than any other team. We’re assuming this has nothing whatsoever to do with the 2008/09 Maple Leafs.) Yet even if Blake were to score forty goals like he did two years ago, there don't seem to be many players ready to step up and provide secondary scoring punch.

Given the lack of scoring prowess up front, Toronto will need its defense to improve dramatically if they're to be competitive. On that front, they’ll be happy to have Vesa Toskala back in goal; as his back-up, Curtis Joseph can’t possibly be worse than Andrew Raycroft (and if he is, then God help the thousands of fans who bought his jersey during Joseph’s first stint with Toronto). Bryan McCabe, along with his mental errors and his gargantuan contract, were sent packing; his absence will take some getting used to (he'd been a Leaf since 2000/01), but it should end up being a case of addition by subtraction. Ron Wilson, a notorious taskmaster, replaces Paul Maurice behind the bench; his press conferences likely won’t be as entertaining (Maurice was nothing if not eminently quotable), but his no-nonsense, defensive-oriented approach will be well-suited to the job at hand. Still, he faces a daunting task. Wilson will be relying on a diminishing core of veteran players to win him games in 2008/09; otherwise, he’ll need Toronto’s role players and its youngsters to step up. It could happen—but realistically, it’s probably best if we keep our expectations in check.

For the sake of putting a prediction down in writing, here's ours: the Leafs will finish in the bottom three of the Eastern Conference and get a top-five draft pick...which would make us very, very happy, since it'd reinforce the rebuilding task at hand. This prediction is subject to change, especially if Sundin magically reappears. Or if his apparent replacement, Mikhail Grabovski—who couldn’t even crack the Montreal Canadiens’ line-up last year—turns into a legitimate first liner. Again, we're not holding our breath.

At least one thing’s certain: as per usual, the Leafs won’t have any trouble selling tickets, which is good news given the current economic climate. Whether Leaf fans would resort to dressing up as a rival team’s mascot in order to circumvent rising costs—as a new survey by Travelzoo suggests 32% of Canadians would be willing to do—remains to be seen.

Photo by Jason.Chan from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.