Dave Feschuk: Toronto ready for hard grind back to playoffs,

In the anxious days before Tuesday’s season opener, Maple Leafs GM Dave Nonis shared a story with season-ticket holders about a sickening scene from a near-decade-long playoff drought.

“Teams would come in here on a Saturday night and have their dinner reservations for 10:30 already done,” Nonis said, a tinge of disgust in his voice. “Because they would have an easy walk through the ACC, they’d smack us around and then go out with their friends and have a good dinner. Those days are over.”

It’s no small thing that the blood spilled on a typical night in the centre of the hockey universe isn’t solely limited to the damage inflicted by celebratory steak knives on rare rib-eyes. The Leafs might not be anybody’s Stanley Cup contender — heck, they’re nobody’s Cup dark horse, and Nonis, for his part, says he won’t even use that word — “Cup” — “until we have a chance to win it.”

But the refreshing thing, for the longsuffering citizens of Leafs Nation, is that Nonis’s team is no pushover, no laughingstock. For too long a punchline, the Leafs can now make a case that they’re on the road to punching their weight. And as the season begins in Montreal, the best-case scenario for the coming six months can easily be painted into a compelling picture of possibility.

If the Leafs can successfully blend the best qualities of last year’s playoff squad with the influx of experience in the form of David Clarkson and David Bolland . . .

If Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf can do their best-ever work as Leafs in their respective contract years . . . If Joffrey Lupul can stay healthy and James van Riemsdyk can keep improving . . . If Jake Gardiner can find defensive stability to go with his offensive flair . . . If the goaltending combo of James Reimer and Jonathan Bernier can turn a B-plus position into an A-plus one . . .

Well, you get the idea. You can stack up the “ifs” and get awfully optimistic. Still, in a town that’s barely over watching the Blue Jays concoct a pre-season hype machine that congratulated itself into quick oblivion, you’ll understand why the Leafs aren’t beating their drum particularly loudly.

Sure, Randy Carlyle sounded bullish enough after his team partook in its last practice of the pre-season: “We feel better about our team (now) than we did at this time last year,” said the coach.

But more than a few high-profile Leafs have sounded a note of cautious positivity in the past month.

As Nonis said last week, summing up his feelings about 2013-14: “It’s going to be harder.”

It’s going to be harder, he was saying, because this season will tally 82 games instead of last year’s lockout-truncated 48. It’s going to be harder because in the NHL’s new alignment the Leafs compete in a 16-team Eastern Conference instead of the old 15-team one. Just the top three finishers in the eight-team Atlantic Division get automatic playoff berths and two other wild- card teams will earn post-season time. The math isn’t favourable. It’s going to be harder because, as Phaneuf was saying on Monday, “we know we’re not going to surprise anybody.” The Canadiens, for instance, were rag-dolled by the fight-loving Leafs in last season’s series, but they were seen Monday practising with a tough-guy line of Brandon Prust, George Parros and Travis Moen — which is to say, they’re ready. It’s going to be harder because by some measures the Leafs — as much as their playoff jaunt enlivened a comatose sports landscape — weren’t very good last year. They’re one of four teams in a 20-year span to make the playoffs while getting outshot by an average of five or more shots per game. Shot differential and its various statistical offshoots are at the crux of the advanced statistical analysis that suggests Toronto’s NHLers are due for an impending regression. It’s going to be harder because the Leafs, for all that’s changed in the off-season, come into this campaign with a lot of the same problems they’ve had for a while now. They’ve got a No. 1 centre, Tyler Bozak, who doesn’t inhabit the same stratosphere as the game’s best No. 1 centres. And on that front they’re hoping Nazem Kadri, who elevated himself from an AHLer to a thirdline centre to a second-line man a season ago, will use the carrot of a recently negotiated two-year contract and further raise his game to top-line level. They’ve got a captain moonlighting as a No. 1 defenceman, Phaneuf, who is miscast in both roles and whose arduous contract makes him a value-for-money underperformer in almost every game he plays. And so they’re hoping that their depth on defence will make up for their lack of elite-level experience, and that the conglomerate of Clarkson and Bolland and Lupul and Jay McClement will do enough to steer the dressing-room dynamic by committee. They’ve got Reimer, in whom they had such faith that they paid big to acquire Bernier, who fits in with this group because he has yet to prove himself as an elite No. 1. It hasn’t helped that September has been a month of red flags; that Clarkson, the heavy-hitting winger, is suspended for the opening 10 games for a pre-season lapse of judgment that saw him needlessly hop the boards to join a line brawl against the Buffalo Sabres; that Lupul, who has been electric when healthy, missed the opening throes of training camp complaining of back spasms; that there have been grumbles in Leafland about a general lack of on-ice preparedness thanks to a training camp dominated by concerns over a salary-cap crunch.

“Is it going to be harder (to make the playoffs)? I think you could say that. It’d be fair to say that. But you have to think on the other side of things, too,” Reimer said. “Last year we had confidence, but I think there were times when we were still uncertain, too.

“Now, we have full confidence in our system, full confidence in our teammates. And we know that if we play our hardest, we’re as good as anyone. Last year, even though we knew that, we hadn’t seen it. We had to go prove it. Now we know we can do it.”

They may know, but such is the new reality of respectability: they’ll still need to provide proof, every night before dinner.