from Pierre LeBrun of ESPN,

I asked interim head coach Peter Horachek after Thursday's practice how he would have reacted had I told him in training camp that everything listed above was going to happen.

"Take a hike," Horachek said would have been his answer, and while he was chuckling, it's probably true.

I posed the same question to goalie James Reimer, to put himself back at camp and imagine for a moment that the season would have rolled out like this nightmare.

"No, going back to camp, I thought we had put a pretty good group here," Reimer said Thursday. "Obviously you're never going to have the perfect team, but we definitely had potential to do some stuff. If a team comes together, that's a real possibility. A lot of bad habits crept into our game. We just weren't able to correct them and things just kind of fell apart."

The Maple Leafs' headline-a-minute season has been the talk of the NHL. One cannot get off the phone with a coach or scout or team executive without the Leafs coming up unprompted in the conversation.

We asked one rival team executive Thursday how he would put the Leafs' season into words.

"Before the season began, they undercut a very good GM by firing his support staff," said the executive, referring to Dave Nonis and his assistants, Claude Loiselle and Dave Poulin, who were let go last summer. "They fired a good -- albeit tough -- coach in Randy Carlyle before the midway point in the season and declared that his replacement was only a temp.

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