Saw Cliff Fletcher after the Leafs' 3-2 win over the Los Angeles Kings Monday night in the Chick Hearn press room at Staples Centre. He mostly lives in Phoenix nowadays, but joined the Leafs in L.A. in time for the game; travelled with them to San Jose last night; and will carry on through to the end of the trip on Thursday versus his hometown Coyotes.
Fletcher ran the Leafs on an interim basis after John Ferguson Jr. was let go and until Brian Burke was hired to take over. He stayed on as a "consultant" to Burke afterwards - and unlike most people who are appointed consultants in the NHL as a means of bidding them adieu, he actually does offer input into decisions and maintains an active voice within Burke's inner circle.
Cliff and I go way back. Deep in a file drawer somewhere, I still have the invitation that he sent me to attend that first Calgary Flames training camp in 1980-81. All I remember about the experience is that two days in - one for fitness testing, one for on-ice sessions - coach Al MacNeil told me I could stick a couple of extra days because I wasn't causing too much of a disruption. But I said no. That afternoon, I'd done a series of drills behind Kent Nilsson, not knowing too much about him at the time, and the realization soon sank in - I was in way over my head. This guy was playing at a tempo and skill level that I could imagine only in my wildest dreams. By April, I didn't feel quite as bad - because Nilsson scored something like 133 points in the NHL that year. But seeing him at ice level was a wholly intimidating experience.
I wore 24 in my group, the same number as a rookie named Jim Peplinski did in the other. Everybody that told me how well I did (because they saw which number I was wearing in the newspaper photos), they had me confused with Peplinski, who did have a good camp and eventually made the team as a rookie.
It was a different era back then. Largely as a cost-saving measure and for the convenience of it, reporters actually travelled with the team, commercially and the occasional time that they'd charter, usually in situations like the one the Leafs found themselves in these past two days, where they're playing back-to-back and want to get to the next destination as soon as possible for maximum recovery purposes. Or that's how it was in MacNeil's two years behind the bench.
When Bob Johnson took over, he was the ultimate morning person - demonstrating an ungodly cheerfulness, no matter how early the hour. Moreover, no matter how late the game went the previous night, Johnson had the travel secretary schedule the team out on the first flight the next morning. My opposite number at the time was a happy-go-lucky man named Scott Haskins; often, at around 5 a.m. in the morning, dragging ourselves around in some anonymous airport somewhere, functioning on about four hours sleep, we'd look at each other and start singing the first few bars to the Guess Who's Glamour Boy - because there was nothing remotely glamorous about the job at that precise far-too-early moment in time.
Nowadays, because of increasing awareness about the value of sleep, teams duck out of town ASAP and leave reporters in their wake to catch up the next morning. It's particularly challenging in the L.A. area, where there are all kinds of early-morning flight options, none of them particularly attractive. I'm on a Southwest flight out of Orange County this morning; they've just announced that because of a power failure in Tucson , our departure will be delayed. Thankfully, the airport in San Jose is centrally located; there should still be time to get to the Leaf morning skate, although my visit with the Sharks' players and coaching staff may need to wait until two hours before game time. Luckily, San Jose's staff is good about that. Even as they struggle through an unexpectedly average first half, they are available to talk about the different trials and tribulations.
Tonight's San Jose-Toronto match should be an interesting test for the Leafs, given how the Sharks are coming off a weekend shutout loss and are unexpectedly in the midst of a pack of eight or nine teams fighting for the last four or five playoff spots in the Western Conference. Usually, these back-to-back games are a challenge for any visiting team. With the pressure on the Sharks to finally hit their stride and the Leafs playing for the second time in 48 hours, San Jose should be out of the gate fast - and the Leafs will need to weather the early storm.
What impressed me most about Monday's win over Los Angeles was simply that they found a way to win. Usually, every team plays between 30 and 40 games per season, in which there is no discernible or appreciable difference between the two teams on the ice, and yet one team emerges victorious, sometimes for the most negligible of reasons.
Often, the sign of a team on the rise is that when they get into that situation - 2-2 in the third, the game up for grabs - they find a way to win, something the Leafs did against the Kings. The winning goal came on a scrambly, nothing sort of play - Nikolai Kulemin retrieving a loose puck around the Kings' crease ahead of Anze Kopitar and firing a shot past goalie Jonathan Quick before he could get set. On balance, the Leafs' record in one-goal games has been decent this year. Last night's was their eighth win against five regulation losses and four overtime losses. At the midpoint of the season, it leaves them with 38 points - probably too far back to legitimately consider themselves a playoff contender for this year. But a few more wins on the nights like Monday's when a victory is there to be had and things could change for the better in a hurry.