My thoughts on tonights game as a whole are the same as I’ve pretty much thought all season.

“WHY AREN’T THEY THE FIRST LINE?”

Niklas Hagman, Mikhail Grabovski, and Nikolai Kulemin are by far the top line on this leafs team and they continued to prove it tonight with a stunning 6-3 win that would’ve been much better if Toskala hadn’t continued to be mediocre.

To start off, I can’t say enough about Grabovski. He’s just simply been on fire the last 4 games, getting six goals and two assists in that time. For a guy who had three goals in his 27 game career with the Montreal Canadiens, he’s looking pretty good now, with 7 in 15. That second rounder is looking less and less meaningful by the night, with him scoring a goal and adding an assist tonight.

Hagman was also fantabulous, potting two goals, with Nik Antropov, Pavel Kubina (my personal favourite leaf), and Alexei Ponikarovsky scoring the other goals. For the 11th straight time, the Leafs have outshot the opponents, and are now 6-5-4 on the year.

Robert Lang, Tomas Plekanec and Captain Saku Koivu scored for the Habs, who fall to an only somewhat amazing 8-2-2. They defintely didn’t go out quietly, with both Tom Kostopoulous and Sergei Kostitsyn being sent off by the end of the game.

Kostopolous made a boneheaded play, hitting Mike Van Ryn from behind. Van Ryn would be hurt on the play, and the most recent word coming from Toronto is that Van Ryn is in the hospital with a “head injury”, though CBC seems to think its just precautionary.

As for Kostitsyn, he felt as if he was entitled to being the 382nd guy of the night to run Mikhail Grabovski, and proceeded to request a fight from Grabo. Grabo seemed just as interested, but thanks to the referees already trying to get Sergei into the box, and Hagman telling Grabo to shut the **** up, that never happened and SKos got an extra ten minutes.

A goal was disallowed with 6:49 left to go, because Chris Higgins apparently doesn’t know where to place his stick.

All in all, a good game. Also, the pre-game ceremony was great. They had the normal HOF game honoring, plus their rememberance day extravaganza rolled into one. It was quite nice, really.