Gustavsson gives Leafs reason to believe

ABSTRACT With back-to-back wins, GM Brian Burke's plan of building the team from the net outwards appears to finally be paying off

FULL TEXT It is a long-promised scenario but one fewer and fewer people believed could happen - the Toronto Maple Leafs are heading into a new week running on all cylinders. Their forwards, buoyed by the addition of Phil Kessel after recovering from shoulder surgery, are finally scoring. The defence, which started to come together a couple of weeks ago, is playing with confidence. All are benefiting from the arrival, finally, of consistent goaltending. The result is a genuine, bona fide winning streak, the Leafs' first of the season. Two whole wins in a row, and not only that, they came on back-to-back nights on the road and at home, culminating in a 5-1 domination on Saturday night of the Detroit Red Wings in the NHL's Hockey Hall of Fame game. While Kessel, who scored his first goal in a Leafs uniform against the Red Wings, has made a big difference, it is goaltender Jonas Gustavsson who should get the most credit for putting the brakes on what was looking like a train wreck of a season. He still has his flaws (a few too many fat rebounds) but he is athletic enough to recover from most of his mistakes, and he is giving the Leafs what veteran Vesa Toskala could not - consistency. Gustavsson is the one who is finally letting others see what Leafs general manager Brian Burke has been trying to do - build the team from the goal out. He started by spending most of his free-agent money on the defence, figuring Toskala would be good enough to hold the team in for somewhere around 40 games while Gustavsson spent his first season in the NHL getting his feet wet a little quicker than most rookies with 30 games or so. The plan got messed up in training camp shortly after Gustavsson arrived from Sweden. He turned out to have a heart ailment that kept him out of all but the last two preseason games. But what a tantalizing two nights they were - Gustavsson shut out the Red Wings in three periods spread over two back-to-back games. When the season started, the Leafs stuck to the plan, only to see Toskala fall flat on his face despite insisting he was fully recovered from groin and hip surgery last spring. There was another glitch when Gustavsson hurt his groin and missed two weeks. Now, though, after bewitching the Wings again (Gustavsson had a shutout streak of 105 minutes 59 seconds against them), the young Swede is well on his way to joining Curtis Joseph, Johnny Bower and Mike Palmateer in the hearts of Leafs fans. Well, okay, maybe that's premature, but the kid sure looks good right now. Knowing there is someone at the back end to cover up for them makes a world of difference for the defence. "Anybody will agree we're playing better as a unit," Leafs defenceman Jeff Finger said. "[Gustavsson] is a wall back there. He's playing the kind of game you need to win. That lets us play the way we need to be confident. If you turn the puck over, you know he'll be there." Gustavsson, definitely the most un-monster-like fellow who was ever given the moniker The Monster, looking more like Big Bird at 6 foot 3 and 192 pounds, is still at the aw-shucks stage of his professional Hockey career. "The D helps me, makes my confidence gain," he said of the Leafs' defence. "If you [stop] the first shot, the guys are going to help you. When the guys play good in our end everybody takes confidence." Gustavsson did allow that beating the Red Wings, a "classic team" in his words, was a big thrill, probably because it's loaded with Swedish stars he grew up admiring such as Nicklas Lidstrom and Henrik Zetterberg. An added bonus was one of his heroes, Leafs great Borje Salming, looking down from a row of Hall of Famers. However, Gustavsson said he really had no idea things would turn out like this in his first NHL season. "Yeah, I'm not a big thinker," Gustavsson said. "I do not think so much before the season how the season will go. I'm just happy to be here, working to be better and better. I didn't think if I would play one game the first month or 10 games. I just work hard in practice, try to learn something new every day." The only damper on the night was the loss of defenceman Mike Komisarek in the second period. He collided with Wings forward Todd Bertuzzi and Leafs head coach Ron Wilson would only say he has a lower-body injury. Wilson also said he does not consider it to be a serious injury.