The Maple Leaf Media Backpedals Furiously

Can it be barely four months since Toronto sports writers were flaying the Maple Leafs as an overpaid, undercoached, dysfunctional mess? What a difference a new defenseman and a win over the Islanders can make!

Back in the fall, Toronto's stuttering start to the season sent the press box into a frenzy: The coach must be fired; the new general manager is in over his head; the players should be dragged into the streets for public lashings.

Typical among the doomsayers was Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun, who warned darkly that "trust between coach and player has all but disappeared."

"Everyone is unhappy," an anonymous (naturally) player agent told Simmons.

"The players are going in one direction, the coach is going in another, and the general manager is trying to figure out precisely what is going on," concluded the journalist.

The obviously diseased atmosphere did not prevent the Leafs from reeling off a 16-game winning streak not long after this article appeared. Nor has it prevented them from competing for the Eastern Conference championship.

Now, with Toronto's acquisition of defenseman Brian Leetch, the malcontents have reversed course.

Simmons seems to have adopted a new role as the team's father confessor:

"The tears he held in were not those of joy," he writes of Leetch's debut with the Leafs. "The cracks in his voice were very real. He isn't unhappy being a Leaf, just unhappy to not have begun and ended his career in the same place."

"He needs now to catch his breath, plant his feet, look around, meet his teammates, have a laugh and start all over again... soon Brian Leetch will be smiling, soon this will be his hockey home."

Pass the Kleenex.

Can this be the same hard-bitten reporter who only a few weeks ago was writing of the same team, "There is a breakdown in the system -- a nasty, bitter, disbelieving breakdown -- that this lineup, this coaching staff, this team, can't be successful in its current form."

If all they needed was a trade with the Rangers and a 6-2 whipping of the Islanders, why didn't he say so at the time?