Читать книгу Hope and Heartbreak in Toronto. Life as a Maple Leafs Fan онлайн

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The lumbering Gill continued to trudge around his own zone for little more than a year before he was dealt by Cliff Fletcher to the Pittsburgh Penguins for a second-round pick. Gill looked every bit as awkward in Pittsburgh but strangely was much more competent than in Toronto. He filled a solid depth role for the Penguins for the remaining season-plus he played there. His forty-four playoff appearances in Pittsburgh were two more than he had to that point in his career and exceeded by forty-four how many post-season games he played for the Leafs. Gill, like Macoun and Murphy before him, soon hoisted the Stanley Cup. For Gill, it came after his second season in Pittsburgh, and he’d even played a key role in the Pens getting to the final the previous year.

Where does Craig Muni fit into this? Well, the Toronto native grew up around the same time as Macoun and Murphy. A year younger than those two, he was drafted by the Leafs twenty-fifth overall in 1980, twenty-one picks after Murphy was taken by the Los Angeles Kings (Macoun was passed over in the same draft). He never broke in with the Leafs, who instead were concentrating their efforts on ruining the careers of young defencemen Jim Benning and Fred Boimistruck, while others such as Jim Korn, Bob McGill, and Gary Nylund barely managed to escape Harold Ballard’s zoo with their careers intact. Lucky for Muni he played just nineteen games for the Leafs and was signed by the Edmonton Oilers in 1986. When he got to Edmonton he stepped right into a lineup that included Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, and Paul Coffey and which had just won its second consecutive Stanley Cup. Muni was part of the Oilers third and fourth straight triumphs and stayed on when Edmonton won another in 1990 without Gretzky, who had been traded to Los Angeles by that time.