I went to see the Toronto Marlies play the Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins at the Ricoh Coliseum on Sunday. The baby Leafs moved from St. John’s this season and replaced the Toronto Roadrunners (the Oilers’ AHL affiliate) as the junior team in Toronto. This was my second time seeing a junior team, with the first being when I saw the Seattle Thunderbirds play; however the Thunderbirds are part of WHL and this was an AHL game. Their jersey is also very similar to the Maple Leafs, and you couldn’t see the wording on their logo anyways so it was almost like going to a Leafs game without taking out a mortgage.

It was a fairly entertaining match with the Marlies beating the division leading Penguins by a score of 3-1. We were hoping they would score 2 more goals so that everyone would get free pizza from Pizza Pizza. Although you couldn’t redeem it at the Pizza Pizza in Ricoh Coliseum.

Each team had something like 37 shots apiece so it was safe to say that the baby Leafs don’t have the same problems as the parent team. I recognized a couple of players who were formerly in the NHL: Bates Battaglia who played for both Carolina and the Avs, Jean-Sebastien Aubin who played for the NHL Penguins, and John Pohl who didn’t play this game but previously was called up for a couple of games. The Penguins also had Rico Fata who played for the Canadian juniors a couple of years ago.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: hockey, toronto