from David Shoalts of the Globe and Mail,

The Toronto Maple Leafs need Brendan Shanahan the player, not Brendan Shanahan the president.

In his 21 years as a power forward with a scoring touch that took him to The Hockey Hall of Fame, Shanahan spent a lot of time pounding bodies in those areas Leafs head coach Randy Carlyle said, in increasingly wistful terms as this lost season wound down, he would like his players to venture – along the boards and in front of the net. He really was a hard man to play against, something the current crop of Leafs like to talk about but rarely are.

The biggest problem with the Maple Leafs is they remind anyone of a certain age of the Maple Leafs from the Harold Ballard-Gerry McNamara era of the late 1980s. That team had some talented players such as Russ Courtnall, Gary Leeman and Wendel Clark. Gerry’s Kids, as they were called, since McNamara the general manager drafted most of them and insisted they were all terrific.

But Clark was one of the few with a competitive streak and that team was notorious for how quickly the players stopped working, much to the fury of head coach John Brophy.

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