SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Monday, October 27, 2014 9
Why the Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t won
the Stanley Cup for nearly half a century
Part two of three
P
kenneth cheak kwan lam › staff writer
rior to the cancelled 2004
to 2005 season, the Leafs had
an ill-advised pattern of trading away 1st-round selections
for unproven and/or unspectacular (and
sometimes rental) players in order to
make a run (albeit a short one at best)
in the playoffs. They would also opt
for band-aid solutions in the form of
signing relatively-big names but pasttheir-prime unrestricted/Group III free
agents (at least 31 years old) to longterm expensive contracts in order to fill
roster voids on a short-term basis. For
instance, Leafs Nation should remember how former General Manager John
Ferguson, Jr. infamously traded away the
rights to future Star Goaltender Tuukka
Rask to the Boston Bruins for inconsistent counterpart Andrew Raycroft (who