Toronto Maple Leafs: Don't Expect a Pie to Bake in the Fridge

Leafs goaltending has been a major factor and everyone’s saying “trade for him,”, “call him up,” “trade him," or my favourite “kill him!"

You can say whatever you want about our goalies, but we have to admit that our goalies suck. Plain and simple, our goalies don’t play at a high level and Justin “Future” Pogge doesn’t seem very solid. 

But did we not learn anything from John Ferguson, Jr. about replacing players? We do not look for quick fixes for our forwards and defensemen, why should we do that for our goalies? We keep looking elsewhere for a goalie that’s going to be great when maybe we can develop our young goalies.

Now, I probably have you guys saying, “Okay, we’ll trade for a young goalie and develop him." But this is where the article title comes in: Don’t expect a pie to bake in the fridge.

What does this exactly mean? It means that you cannot expect something good to come out of a bad environment.

In other words, you cannot expect a goaltender to develop for the Leafs if you’re weak on the defensive side. This may be a factor in why Justin Pogge is not playing well.

My best recommendation is to simply do nothing about the goaltending issue at the moment. If the Leafs do bring in a guy like Jonathan Quick (they obviously won’t), they are jeopardizing his potential.

Toronto fans are not patient with goalies. We can kill a prospect in no time.

Right now, there are not that many great goaltenders that the Leafs can build around, so let's do what Cliff Fletcher did about coaching. Instead of throwing the job at the first guy that we see, let's wait two years and see who becomes available.  Yes, it’s a long time, but by getting a goaltender soon, you’re pretty much saying “I want the Leafs to start winning!”

If the Leafs do start winning, will they make the playoffs? No. We have time;we have three to five years to rebuild and become a competitive team. Let’s clean up the other players first and then see what we can do about goaltending. Once we have decent forwards and defensemen,then we can search for a goaltender in year three.

Then we can use the remaining year or two (if it were to last 5 years) to put the icing on the cake and build on our offensive rush and defensive force.

Guys, let’s not buy a microwave pie and let it bake in the fridge because then we will just end up making the pie colder. Let’s wait until a microwave comes into our price range, then we can bake up a delicious pie.