The Defensive Pairing Carousel!

Wheel of morality turn turn turn
Tell us the lesson that we should learn

With McCabe coming back on Thursday the Maple Leafs now have a decent selection of available defenders. The problem is, who plays with who?

Initially I want to say:

Kubina-Kaberle
McCabe-Stralman
Gill-Colaiacovo

Kaberle and Kubina play fairly well together, and until McCabe is 100% back to speed they can both eat up a lot of minutes on the ice.

McCabe will benefit from playing with Stralman since Stralman is a good skater and outlet passer and is probably willing to defer to McCabe's shot on the point. Stralman will benefit from the more physical defensive game McCabe plays than he does.

Colaiacovo and Gill are then a third pairing in name only, I think they're two solid players who can both get physical and could be used to hit opponents skilled lines.

We'll see how all of this plays out, I'm just hoping Cola can stay healthy for a while and really start to develop.

Carlo Colaiacovo and the Leafs defense

Carlo played 20 minutes last night in a Marlies win, he was a plus one. To me that says his knee is probably feeling better. Looking ahead at the Marlies schedule though, they have the following:

12/26 Toronto @ Rochester
12/27 Grand Rapids @ Toronto

Unfortunately this coincides with the Leafs' next two game:

12/26 Toronto @ Long Island
12/27 Toronto @ Philadelphia

It seems unlikely that Carlo would get the call up in between those two games, though if he played in Rochester on the 26th it wouldn't be too far of a trip to get him down to Philly. More importantly, with two games in two days it might make sense to just let Colaiacovo play both games in the AHL to get some confidence, to find out more about his knee's shape, all while he's in the AHL and not really abusing it playing for the Leafs against a dirty physical team like the Flyers.

Here's hoping we see Colaiacovo on HNIC against the Rangers. As a Christmas gift, I present to you the Leafs' defensive lineup with Cola and McCabe:

McCabe-Kaberle
Kubina-Colaiacovo
Gill-White

No offense to Stralman, I like the kid, but it's clear that the Leafs think Andy "Herpes" Wozniewski is a better player than Anton, so all we can do is cross our fingers that McCabe and Colaiacovo are both healthy at the same time.