Leafs surge: better late than never?

Late-season wins for a non-contending team can be awfully misleading, but you’d always rather see players developing on a positive arc than the other way around.

The recent “usual suspects” rose to the fore again last night, particularly Kulemin, Bozak and company. They will need to be this good—and even better, in the fall when it will really matter.

Will Kulemin take the step I’m expecting (I’ve written in the past that I believe he is capable of doubling his point totals next year, in what will be his third season)?

Will Bozak progress, or take some steps back, as second-year players often do?

We’ll see.

But for now, we all see progress.

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Here are some Vintage Leaf Memories posts you may have missed:

• It was worth the drive to Chatham recounts the spring of 1963, when, at the age of nine, I went off with the older brothers of my good friend Gerald to Chatham so I could see the Leafs play Montreal in a key playoff match-up. (The game was blacked out in my hometown because we lived near Detroit, and we had to drive an hour to rent a hotel room just to see the game.)

• Eddie Chadwick—the last Leaf ironman looks at the Leaf goalie (pictured) who was the last Leaf netminder to play every single game in a season. Chadwick was one of the very first Leaf players I remember as a kid in the late 1950s. He was the number one goalie for a couple of seasons, until Johnny Bower arrived early in the Punch Imlach era and eventually became the undisputed top guy in the net.

• Pulford’s winner and a busted television recalls Game 3 of the 1967 Stanley Cup finals. That night, Bower and Montreal’s Rogatien Vachon put on a goalie clinic, in a marvelous playoff game that went into double-overtime. Leaf forward Bob Pulford finally ended it when he re-directed a pass past the young Montreal netminder, enabling the Leafs to go ahead in the series two games to one at that point. You’ll have to read the story to know why the TV in my house was never the same after that goal.

If you have any memories you’d like to share, send them along!