One of the very few things Jay Feaster did correctly in his time as general manager of the Calgary Flames — and it's also the thing that ultimately cost him his job, if you can believe that — is that he started talking about “intellectual honesty.”

This after years of fielding feckless, noncompetitive teams that were plainly awful to all observers outside the organization, but which didn't matter because the team sold out every game anyway and therefore had every reason to continue to try to sell things out by marketing that they were “Going For It.” Thus keeping Jarome Iginla until the return for him was minimal. Thus signing big-money free agents. Thus finishing ninth or 10th in the West, instead of 13th or 14th so that they could begin their rebuild in earnest.

Intellectual honesty is something of which there is currently a paucity in the National Hockey League, and this is currently most true in the center of the sport's universe: Toronto.

The Maple Leafs, you see, are in a free-fall, having entered last night as losers of their last six games and seven of their last eight. Dating back to the end of February, they've won just two games out of 14 in regulation. During that time, they predictably went from “comfortably holding a playoff spot” to “sitting 10th in the East with more games played than anyone else with a credible claim to the final two wild card spots.” Which basically means that everyone in front of them will have to start punting games while they magically turn things on a dime and take about 12 points from their final eight games (to get to the likely playoff threshold of 92). Which seems unlikely.

And so with this disastrous month of March has come some rather predictable finger-pointing, both from fans and those within the organization. The brunt of it has fallen on poor James Reimer, who's been one of the best Leafs goaltenders in recent memory over the past few years (.914, very slightly above league average) and who for most of the season has been very good. But the latest stretch has been terribly unkind to him, as you might expect for a goalie who posted a .930-something save percentage in the first two months of the season. His .896 save percentage in eight games in March, has certainly cost the Leafs games.

But it's important to keep in mind here that these are games they should not, by rights, be winning anyway. This tough stretch for the Leafs would be a tough stretch for just about anyone, given how the schedule was composed: the run of futility began at San Jose, included an improbable win at Los Angeles, then cratered at Washington and Detroit. The Leafs then returned home to host Tampa and Montreal, traveled to New Jersey, and hosted the Blues, all in the span of 14 days. That's a lot of road work against a lot of teams that are far better than them.

Randy Carlyle said earlier this week that the team isn't getting the bounces it once did, and that really only makes sense, at least when your team defense is as woeful as the Leafs' is and has been. Dion Phaneuf has shouldered a lot of the blame lately too, and for good reason, because he's been notably underwhelming and he's also the team's captain. But when your No. 2 guy in terms of minutes is Cody Franson, the team was always asking for serious trouble when it comes to stopping guys from scoring on them.

That the city's turning on Reimer, who's so gone this offseason as to be comical, and Phaneuf isn't really surprising because all they see is goals going in while Jonathan Bernier was on the shelf, and D getting their doors blown off. But really, these games have been close on the scoreboard to some extent. Only the loss to San Jose was by more than two goals. So clearly something else has gone wrong here, and it should come as no surprise that this simple fact never really occurred to the people now screaming at players' wives on Twitter: This was a team that needed its goalies to stand on their heads to win, from the start of the season until now. The Leafs' long periods of losing (this current one and the one that stretched from mid-November until mid-December) were both typified by the goaltending trending downward.

Which tells you what? That Leafs fans should be thanking Reimer and Bernier for getting them this far. Without their strong performances at different points this season, they'd be a lottery team.

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