Leafs head south to battle Lightning

Hockey Betting Lines

11/01/2006 - (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - The Toronto Maple Leafs will try for their first three-game winning streak of the season when they visit the Tampa Bay Lightning tonight at St. Pete Times Forum.

The Maple Leafs won back-to-back games for the first time this year when they beat Atlanta on Monday. Darcy Tucker scored twice and Tomas Kaberle added another power-play goal, all within a span of 1:26 in the first period, to help Toronto to the 4-2 victory.

Jeff O'Neill also scored and Mats Sundin tallied three assists for Toronto, which beat Atlanta for an eighth straight time. The Maple Leafs have outscored the Thrashers 26-5 over the last five meetings. That includes a franchise- record seven power play goals in a 9-1 win at Atlanta on October 14, 2005.

Andrew Raycroft stopped 31 shots for Toronto, which also won at Montreal on Saturday.

The Lightning, meanwhile, have dropped each of their last two games. They were handed a 4-2 setback by the visiting San Jose Sharks on Sunday. Evgeni Nabokov stopped 18 shots to help lift the Sharks.

Vincent Lecavalier and Martin St. Louis lit the lamp for Tampa Bay, while defenseman Dan Boyle registered two assists.

Marc Denis made 25 stops between the pipes for the Lightning, who had won three straight before the current slide.

This is the first meeting of the season between the Maple Leafs and Lightning. The clubs split four matchups last year.

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FOOTBALL TRASH TALK

NFL Football Trash Talk

Trash talk has a place in every competitive endeavor (except baseball; those stirrup-wearers are too busy chewing on their sunflower seeds and their supplements to worry about what their opponents are doing).

Fantasy sports is no exception. Any intelligent discussion of the subject would probably start with a thesis statement or a definition of terms. Thankfully, this wont be an intelligent discussion.

Let me just say that I am happy to take a place in this space alongside my talented colleagues, even our commissioner. (You should see how she bleats like a demented paper boy about league fees on our fantasy site).

Trash talking, I would argue, is primarily about amusing your friends, their sheeplike demeanors and sloping foreheads notwithstanding. The best place I have found for football trash talking is at www.SportsAlarm.com.

Beyond the entertainment factor, though, I would recognize that the sophomoric ritual has one advantage, when properly applied. It magnifies your fantasy triumphs and mitigates your fantasy failures by transforming the eventual point total into an afterthought. Winning makes it seem like your opponent really is a truss-owning, lapel-pin-wearing nitwit. And in defeat, trash talk can be the air bag to break the fall from your hyperbolic heights. The plug-necked yahoos on your team, you can say, will be sacking groceries by the end of the season.

The best trash talk, in my view, is layered and nuanced. And it doesnt focus only on your opponents team. It picks apart your opponent. The idea is to create a shock-and-awe-scale blizzard of nonsense, and the goal is to make your opponent drop his hands from his keyboard in exasperation.

What team does your opponent root for? Accuse a Giants fan of having a Joe Namath pillowcase. Wheres your opponent from? Give a look of concern no matter his reply, then say, I'll try to type slower for you next time. Is your opponent into politics? Label everyone a tax-and-spend corporate shill.

Cap all that with a liberal application of irrelevance. For instance, dont just conclude by saying your opponent is a twerp who drafts like my grandmother. Say that your opponent is a sweater-wearing, eyebrow-plucking twerp who drafts his team about as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor gave acceptance speeches at the Oscars. By the time your foe makes sense of that, his starting running back will have had puppies.

But what about you? Hmm? Recall a memorable slam? Have a tried-and-true technique? Know someone who seems impervious to insult? Take a moment and tells us about it. Put together some (fit-for-publication) thoughts. You wont be too busy returning phone messages from your friends, Im sure, to reply.

In addition to the trash talking, the Sports Alarm has a huge gallery of high resolution pictures of beautiful women and models in bikinis. The most popular models are: Lindsay Lohan, Carrie Underwood, Alessandra Ambrosio, and Paris Hilton.