Plan the parade route. The Toronto Maple Leafs have five points in their last four games, bringing their season total to a tremendous six. At this pace, they’ll be competing for 14th place in the Eastern Conference in a just a couple short weeks. With a 1-7-4 record this far into the season, the current Leafs find themselves mulling through the worst start in Toronto’s long history. There are many fans in Toronto who cannot remember – or were not alive for – the Leafs’ last Stanley Cup victory in 1967, and it already seems like 2009-10 is not the year of redemption.

Phil Kessel is supposed to make his debut with the Leafs tonight, and fans will be able to begin to evaluate whether or not he’s worth the two first and a second round draft picks that Leafs GM Brian Burke gave up for him – picks given away during a rebuilding process. The scary part about the addition of Phil Kessel is that, while he may have proved himself thus far as a “real deal” first round pick, it’s still unknown if he can carry a team like the Maple Leafs by himself, because it doesn’t look like anybody else is going to.

Jason Blake has the worst shooting percentage among every day forwards, unless you count Colton Orr, who has zero goals on nine shots. But he also has 45 penalty minutes in 12 games, which is good for second in the league. Blake was one of the top offensive performers for the Leafs last year, but was also one of the biggest shooting duds the year before. A lot of Toronto’s future potential rides on his ability to put pucks in the net, which is something he’s just not doing this year. Maybe the addition of Kessel to the lineup will be just the shot he needs to get going.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have acquired two points from wins and four points from losses. This is incredibly unbalanced, but if the overtime/shootout loss point did not exist, the Maple Leafs’ already-long season would seem incredibly longer. They say that ‘things are never as bad as they seem’ when a team is doing poorly, but the Leafs are not giving much indication that they are in fact any better than they’re playing. They no better than most that no lead is safe, and if they don’t manage to turn things around soon, they might even be in jeopardy of losing one of the most dedicated fan bases in the world.