[j-monster]

Sundin is a very good player. Why do you have to defend him so much?

Uh, probably because when I read comments like "he's a failure" I feel the need to set the record straight. If someone pissed all over your favourite player you'd just let it go?

as a Steve Young fan, i heard about it all the time until he won the big game...that, and young had some huge shoes to fill, but it's true..until you win a championship, and you're the leader of that team, all the OT winners in regular season play mean nothing in the long run...

Exactly, that's just the way it is in sports. You have to win to get all the accolades. Heck, I think Charles Barkley is one of the top two or three PF's to ever play basketball but he's always going to deal with the fact that he didn't win the big one. I started becoming a Suns' fan when Barkley was traded to the land of the rising sun.

It isn't life or death though. If Sundin never wins the big one, he'll have to deal with a few fans but he'll have millions and millions of reasons to be happy.

I think over the last four years, Naslund has been a better player than Sundin but he hasn't won a Cup. I have no problem with criticism of Naslund because the fact is he hasn't won a Cup yet. Once Manning wins a Super Bowl, you'll start hearing him being mentioned as the best QB in history. He isn't talked about in that category yet because he hasn't won yet.

Tom Brady is considered by most people to be the best QB in football at the moment because he's won 3 SB's. Manning always has better numbers but Brady has the rings.

I just have to add my two cents to this piece. To compare Sundin as a captain to Brady or Manning or a captain/leader in basketball in terms of championships/adeptness as a leader is pretty unfair. In basketball a captain/great player will play almost the whole game, if not the whole game, so he will always have an impact on how his team does. A QB has an impact in all his team's plays on offense, which can be half the game or more. As a captain, Sundin plays, at most, 20 minutes per game, and often plays less (he should play more, but that's another story). That means he can only have an impact for, at most, one third of the game, which is less than football or basketball. Hockey is a sport where more than others you need all of your teammates to help you gain success. This is why, in Sundin's case, you can't shoulder him with a large portion of the blame... clearly his teammates, and the organization for not providing Sundin with enough supporting talent, deserve the lion's share of the blame for the Leafs not winning a Cup in the Sundin era.