Mike Komisarek

There is always a lot of speculation about trades when the draft and the offseason shows up.

There has already been a little bit written about one team that might have interest in trading with the Avalanche.

That got me thinking, if the Avalanche were to go the trading route this particular summer, who might be the ideal with whom to trade?

Mike Komisarek has a lot of heart.

He wears his Maple Leafs' pride on his jersey for all to see. Any doubters only have to look at the game the Leafs played against the Washington Capitals just a few nights ago.

A quote from one of Bleacher Report's longest serving and most popular writers, Mark Ritter, in an article from just nine days ago read something like this.

"Reimer, who had his first bad game against the Phoenix Coyotes on the tail end of a long road trip, leads the Leafs with a tremendous .933 save percentage and sparkling 2.26 goals against average."

Sitting at 19-23-5 after 47 games, nobody will tell you that the Leafs season so far has been a success. Heading into the season with playoff aspirations, the Leafs looked to be an organization built well from the goaltender out.

Currently, the Leafs sit sixth worst in the NHL and 13th in the East, with only the Ottawa Senators and New Jersey Devils behind them while having less cap space. The only good news to come from this is that there are actually teams that are worse off than the Leafs

Let me set the scene:Toronto Maple Leafs at Montreal Canadiens, November 20th, 2010. It's the third period. Montreal are leading with 12 minutes of the period remaining. Montreal have 10 seconds remaining on a a power play. The puck is at the blue line with Hamrlik. A soft, innocuous pass along the boards by Hamrlik passes through the stick of Andre Kostitsyn, and Mike Komisarek goes to retrieve it.

The Toronto Maple Leafs, Phil Kessel, Mike Komisarek and Dion Phaneuf all have one thing in common: they are struggling (if you Google struggling, the lead Google news article is actually about the struggling Leafs).

For Phaneuf, it's the pressure of a season with a less than stellar offensive output and coming back to a team that's been mired in a large slump. A slump that ironically enough, came when Phaneuf and Colby Armstrong went down with injuries.

At 6’5”, 217 pounds, very few people will ever accuse Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman Keith Aulie of being invisible. Yet, that’s exactly what Aulie has been in his eight game stint with the Maple Leafs—and we mean that in a good way!

According to Bruce Garrioch of The Ottawa Sun, Ray Emery is working hard to return from hip surgery. In a few weeks he will skate with an OHL team and then work his way up to the AHL on a 25 game pro tryout. It is likely he completes the tryout before any NHL team takes a chance on him.

Lots of goaltenders have gotten injured, or probably will, as one injury is all it takes to devastate a team. So it is likely that a team will take a chance by signing Emery.

With cough, cold and flu season quickly approaching, the Leafs lately are already playing as if they have been bed ridden for the past handful of days.The Leafs, with their terrible play lately, are becoming the NHL's remedy for any team that is struggling lately, or just plain and simple, needs a game to get back on track.

With the recent wide spread speculation about potentials trades involving the Toronto Maple Leafs, the question has been raised, when is the best time during the season to make a trade?

The answer, at least for the Toronto Maple Leafs, should be now.