Eat Sleep Leafs

Tomas Kaberle is tired of soaking it all in.

Tired of empty summers.

Tired of no playoffs.

“You keep hearing for four years ‘you guys suck, you guys don’t have a good team’ and stuff like that, it puts even more motivation over the summer, thinking ‘enough is enough’,” Kaberle said with his team in the midst of a seven game point streak.

“This is the year we want to change it around.”

Fairly or unfairly, Kaberle came to be a symbol of the disappointment that struck at the nerve of four straight playoff absences.

And while others like Tucker, McCabe, Raycroft, Wellwood and Sundin were jettisoned in some way or another, Kaberle somehow stuck.

Trades to Philly and Boston were nullified.

With each rumour, Kaberle remained a Leaf.

As his numbers slipped with each season following the lockout, the criticism grew, and then to top all off last season, injuries struck.

After a rookie season in which he played 57 games, Kaberle went on to average 78 a season before two separate right hand injuries caused him to miss 25 last year.

Coach Ron Wilson pulled no punches in training camp this fall, saying Kaberle was “fat” last season, and not in the tip-top kind of shape needed to perform at the highest level.

That changed this summer.

“With the guys I’m working out, we changed the little things,” Kaberle said of his offseason training.

“We didn’t want to keep it the same and I lost like six, seven pounds this year and I feel a little better on the ice, comfortable. Obviously when you get older, you’ve got to keep on top of it because as a lighter [player], you can probably skate better and play more minutes.”

Training camp testing according to Wilson, revealed that Kaberle had cut his body fat right in half, an improvement that's shown on the ice this season. The four-time all-star leads all defensemen with 18 points in fifteen games and is on pace for a Paul Coffey-like 98 points.

“Yeah I could notice it in the summer,” he said, “especially August when I skated on the ice pretty much the whole August before September. You notice little things, little jumps, comfortable in the knees. I don’t feel any pain or anything like that.”

The Leafs miserable start this season had many projecting a fifth straight season of failure, but a recent stretch of improved play has his team moving in the right direction.

“The goal is to make it to the playoffs,” Kaberle said bluntly.

“We put ourselves in a deep hole at the start of the season, and we’re kind of battling back right now, so we have to keep going in the same way.”

For Kaberle, much the same.

-J.Siegel
Follow me on Twitter: jonas640