TORONTO —Luke Schenn walked out in a white shirt and a blue tie and black overcoat and he looked directly into the cameras and said, "I got no excuse for it. It's just a bad play." The slow start? "That's obviously my fault," he said. "One hundred percent, I'll take the blame for that."
His nose might be perpetually crooked, just around the bridge, but Schenn told it straight.
The directness was jarring, if only because that's not standard operating practice around here these days. It doesn't matter that Brian Burke didn't make a big move at the NHL trade deadline, because almost nobody made a big move at the NHL trade deadline. If you want to criticize the general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, then the NHL's Cold War deadline is not the place to start. Or to finish, either.
Shacks' Take: Two straight blog posts on the hated Leafs this morning? Well their predicament is so amusing one post just doesn't cover things. Arthur gets this one right. Brian Burke has always protected his players— remember the famous Burke rant during the Red Wings series, "'Sedin' is not Swedish for 'punch me or headlock me in a scrum." But now it just sounds like weak excuses for a deficient team.
Sometimes it's protecting players, sometimes it's enabling poor performance, in this case I'd choose the latter. It's time Leaf management stopped making excuses for the players and started calling them out, they haven't earned the right to make excuses.
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