Toronto Maple Leafs: Pre-Season Thoughts on Some Leafs Players

Let’s start things off with the Leafs starting goaltender, Jean Sebastian Giguere. Giguere made three pre-season appearances and was solid through all of them. As a goaltender it’s all about timing and getting your angles down, worrying about rebound control. Practice is one thing but game situation is another. Giguere being a veteran that he is took an opportunity during the pre-season to make sure he gets things down pat. Then come Thursday night against the Canadiens, he’s gonna be ready to go.

Luke Schenn has made a quick recovery. It’s good to be young like that and when you have a bad back you can bounce back and get back on track. I think Luke has had a pretty good training camp. If you go back to the game in London against the Flyers, he had one shift where he took 3 hits and that’s where he jarred his back. He played through it for a couple of days before it finally locked up on him. But he’s bounced back now and he’s ready to go. He’s very excited about year number 3 after the way things ended last year in year number 2.

I think Komisarek, who’s played 7 preseason games, has played pretty well. The one thing that he has to keep in the back of his mind is when he gets a little too aggressive where he goes out there and makes too many things happen physically, he gets caught up a little bit. After playing only 34 games last year, I think it was real good that Ron Wilson put him in as many games as he did, so he can make sure his shoulder is good and he gets his timing down pat. He’s playing his former team in game #1 on Thursday. You need a good Mike Komisarek to start the season as the Maple Leafs are going to make a run for the playoffs this year.

Other Notes

• Tomas Kaberle is going about his job with quiet efficiency
• Sjostrom has looked pretty good this pre-season and will be very important for the penalty kill this season
• Mike Zigomanis has had a pretty good training camp and hes a nice depth guy if the Leafs go through some injuries, their not going to be afraid to call up a guy like Zigomanis
• Kadri, Caputi and Mitchell all sat out the last game against Detroit. It will be interesting to see what their roles will be this season