Adios Monster, by the way you weren't so scary

The Leafs have traded the rights to free-agent goalie Jonas Gustavsson to the Winnipeg Jets for a conditional seventh round pick in 2013. Conditional seventh round picks are just about the least amount of compensation you can receive for a player. The collective agreement doesn't allow teams to trade players for a bag of pucks. I guess the Jets could have sent the Leafs a bench warmer from their AHL affiliate so the Leafs could have done worse.

Gustavsson was a total disappointment. His goaltending style may have worked for him in Europe but it wasn't effective in the NHL. He was either not mobile enough or over committing and leaving himself out of position. He could make some vary good saves in games but invariably let in a soft goal in far too many games. His tendency to give up early in games suggests to me that he had difficulty mentally preparing himself for games. In the end he was as forgettable as Vesa Toskala, Andrew Raycroft and Justin Pogge. They invested 3 years of development in the Monster and it never really showed.

The Leafs still need a veteran goalie and so far no Roberto Luongo. This may take a while. The only other team with any interest at all is supposedly Florida but their level of interest would be low. They made the playoffs last year with Jose Theodore in net so what take on the big contract.

Who knows how long the staring match between Brian Burke and Mike Gillis will go on until someone blinks. Burke insists he is comfortable starting the season with Reimer and Scrivens. Gillis suggests he would be comfortable having Luongo back. They are both full of shit. These two guys don't apparently like each other so would probably love to stick it to the other guy.

Perhaps Vancouver is the more desperate of the two. They can't really carry two big contracts in net, even with a $70 million cap. They need those dollars freed up. As well Luongo has asked for a trade and wouldn't be happy reporting to Vancouver in the fall. It's a distraction the Canucks can live without. So both guys have to make this deal it's just impossibly to guess how long that will take. So the staring contest continues.