It's been the best of times, it's been the worst of times for the Toronto Maple Leafs; in fact, the past couple weeks have been nothing short of surreal. First, the best of times: wins against the high-flying Ottawa Senators and Montreal Canadiens, followed by a thoroughly unexpected Hockey Day in Canada victory over the league-leading Detroit Red Wings, have given the team a boost. Injured players are getting healthy. The return of the......

One month into the new NHL season, and this much is obvious: the Toronto Maple Leafs are a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, dressed in the league’s silly new jerseys. The Leafs are scoring more often than your younger sister, but they’re also leaking goals at a potentially historic rate. They’ve lost two games by 7–1 final scores, but they’ve also got an 8–1 win and consecutive 4–1 road victories against consensus preseason favourites......

It's been a strange week for Leaf Nation. On Tuesday, Toronto was embarrassed 7-1 (on home ice, no less) by the Carolina Hurricanes—and by Wednesday, the media was gleefully sounding the death knell for this year's edition of the Maple Leafs. On Wednesday night's edition of Off the Record, the panel spent ten minutes analyzing what was going wrong with the Leafs' year, which by then was exactly four games old. The team had......

With much-maligned NHL commissioner Gary Bettman in the crowd, the Toronto Maple Leafs dropped the puck on the 2007-08 season at the Air Canada Centre last night. He was probably unable to catch a glimpse of a homemade sign halfway across the arena that read: “Bettman: ruining the NHL since 1993.” Despite the Buds’ slightly new uniforms (which either look like pajamas or practice jerseys, depending on who you ask), one might have been......

As any hockey fan in Toronto already knows, the NHL draft took place this weekend and featured John Ferguson Jr. trading for a veteran goalie for the second straight year. The newly acquired Vesa Toskala, traded from San Jose, should provide a more stable presence in the net than Andrew Raycroft, and is projected to become the starting netminder. While a quality goalie was obviously a necessity for the Leafs, the fact that they gave......

I love the smell of police raid in the morning. Toronto Vice arrested 60 people in the Jane and Finch area this morning in a raid called Project Kryptic. They seized "30 kilos of cocaine, hash oil and marijuana with an estimated street value of $1 million" from the Driftwood Crips. That's actually pretty badass. Hey, buddy...we're not mad that you stole the Hershey bars, we're just concerned that they may be contaminated with......

It was one of the wildest final weekends in NHL history. The Toronto Maple Leafs delivered a knockout blow to the Montreal Canadiens in one of the most electric matches in recent memory, only to have the New York Islanders break our hearts and take the final playoff spot in a shootout against the New Jersey Devils the following day. The Stanley Cup Playoffs begin tonight, but for the second consecutive year, the Leafs won't......

For the long-suffering fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the year 1967 has become synonymous with past glories and forty years of failure. On Saturday night, the surviving members of the last Leaf team to win the Stanley Cup were reunited at the Air Canada Centre for the first time since that storied championship. An Alex Trebek-narrated video tribute began the proceedings, in what turned out to be a relatively simple, modest, and perhaps......

With their 4-1 loss to the defending Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes Tuesday night, the Toronto Maple Leafs slipped back to a .500 record (19-19-6) yet again, and now sit tied for ninth place in the Eastern Conference, fighting for their playoff lives after having played more than half of their games this season. They're missing a hospital ward full of regular players due to injury (Mike Peca, Alexei Ponikarovsky, Ian White, Kyle Wellwood, Darcy......

Nope, Torontoist isn't referring to the classic movie series. With Halloween just around the corner, it's a different goalie mask creating this sequence of horrors. Although it may be Friday the 27th, the number 13 represents the total amount of goals Toronto Maple Leaf netminders - mainly Andrew Raycroft - have allowed to Ottawa Senator shooters this week. Even by factoring in his day off in between, Raycroft's goals against average over those 3 days......

After the Leafs out-performed Torontoist's pre-season predictions, the real deal gets underway tonight. Despite the 3-5 record over the past two and a half weeks, the team lost a pair against Ottawa, followed by a pair against Detroit (with the Red Wings playing their "B" squad against the Leafs top unit in the second of the two games) leading in to the start of the regular season. So will they turn it around tonight? The......