Leafs Begin Preparations For Season
Posted August 31, 2006 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The official opening of Maple Leafs training camp is just two weeks away, but several players took to the ice on Thursday, hoping to get a head start on their conditioning. After several off-season moves by G.M John Ferguson, they’re also anxious to meet their new teammates and develop a winning rapport.
Veteran players like Darcy Tucker have been around long enough to understand that a disappointing season usually results in a shakeup.
“When you don’t make the playoffs there are changes,” he said. “It doesn’t matter who, or what happens. There will always be some sort of change. And we tried to rectify the problems that we thought we had besides not making the playoffs last year.”
“And you know, we thought maybe that we could help out by getting two big solid defencemen, (Pavel Kubina and Hal Gill) and we went out and did it. It will give Bryan (McCabe) and (Tomas Kaberle) a chance to not log as many minutes and feel not worn down down the stretch and hopefully we’re playing well as a group and as a team the whole way along.”
Jeff O’Neill isn’t rattled by early predictions that the Leafs won’t content for Lord Stanley. Throughout his career he’s seen underdogs pull through time and time again.
“If you ever looked at Carolina’s team last year, I don’t think anybody would pick them to finish in the playoffs, let alone the Stanley Cup. We don’t care for predictions or where people think we will finish. We want to build chemistry. We have new guys on our team and the (goal) any season is to get off to a start and get points early so you are not fighting, scrambling, come the end of March.”
The Leafs pre-season schedule starts on September 18 when they take on the Buffalo Sabres.
The regular season kicks off on October 4th when they host the rival Ottawa Senators.
