This time it is simple. This time, according to Brian Burke, Nazem Kadri is going to stay down in the American Hockey League until he is good enough to play in the NHL.
It doesn't matter how badly the Toronto Maple Leafs are playing - as was the case in Thursday night's 3-2 loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets, who really aren't much more than what the Leafs would look like with one (1) good player.
Doesn't matter how many more wives or girlfriends go into labour, as Mikhail Grabovski's significant other did, resulting in the offensively challenged Leafs playing without their most consistent offensive player of late.
Doesn't matter how many more times the Leafs compound problems, such as Grabovski's absence, with yet another inept display like this one: François Beauchemin failing to control the puck off the end boards and instead swiping it to Kristian Huselius, making the score 2-2; Mike Komisarek blindly passing into the middle of his own end, saved only by a spectacular missed shot at a wide-open net by Andrew Murray; and Phil Kessel getting his pocket picked at the opponent's blueline, leading to a 2-on-zip break and Blue Jackets' first goal.
Yikes! It really was miraculous that the Blue Jackets didn't get the lead until R.J. Umberger's power-play goal at 3:34 of the third period, off a Rick Nash wrist shot. It should have been 4-1, at least, after 20 minutes. The Leafs were dire. Simply dire.
If you were rating this game, it would be half a waffle on a scale of one to five waffles. No more.
But it won't matter. From now on, just call him Nah-zem Kadri.
"We're not going to send [Kadri]up and down," Burke, the Leafs general manager, said before his team's record fell to 13-19-4. "He's going down now to get his game together. I don't expect he'll be back any time soon unless there's a dramatic change in his game.
"This is not a yo-yo job. We've sent him down until he's ready to come back and stay. How long that is? That's up to him."
This time, it appears as though the Leafs mean it. Kadri was assigned to the Marlies on Wednesday with the usual whip marks and admonitions from head coach Ron Wilson, who had made the goal-less player a healthy scratch in three of his past four games.
It is no newsflash that Kadri did not show the physical wherewithal to play in the NHL, although Burke added that he deserved credit for coming in to camp 17 pounds heaver than when he was drafted at 170. That isn't the point of Kadri going down, according to Burke.
"He got meaningful minutes and didn't produce, and the turnovers and the rest of it has got to come out of his game," Burke said. "They are all curable things. We still believe he's going to be a good NHL player for a long time. He's just not ready yet. The biggest hole in his game is pace and that's very common. In junior, you'd see him beat the same guy on a line rush three times. Up here it doesn't happen. If you beat a guy once, guess what? Next time, he's going to come down on your number."
So now it's up to Marlies head coach Dallas Eakins to help Kadri get his game back and that's all to the good because it's clear Wilson has no idea what to do with the kid. And it really is a matter of out of sight out of mind for Wilson because by the time Kadri is ready, it would be just short of a miracle if somebody else wasn't the Leafs head coach.
And that sounds just about right, you know?