TORONTO -- The reaction was silence.

Silence, representing boredom.

	Ed Belfour has had his hands full as the Leafs struggle to score.

In fact, it generally was so quiet in the Air Canada Centre in the first period of a stultifying Avalanche-Maple Leafs game over the weekend, you could hear the holders of Rob Blake's 10 tickets cheering each time he touched the puck -- a stark contrast to the more widespread treatment the Ontario-born Colorado defenseman gets when he plays in Los Angeles.

And this was last Saturday night. Hockey Night in Canada. Leafs vs. a showcase opponent. Tickets going for a premium on Bay Street, adjacent to the arena -- at least until the faceoff approached and the sellers panicked. The studio audience, so to speak, was first bored, then disgusted, especially after Colorado -- with Peter Forsberg back at center and taking command in Joe Sakic's absence -- woke up enough to make the game a little better than dreadful.

And the Leafs?

Well, for one thing, Pat Quinn hits 60 years old Wednesday, when the Maple Leafs face the Hurricanes in Raleigh, in a rematch of last year's Eastern Conference finals.

"I feel terrific and I guess I am happy I am on the right side of the grass," Quinn said to the media in a sardonic moment after that 3-0 loss to Colorado on Saturday night. "It's just another year passing by."

But this team might be enough to turn Quinn's hair completely white. The Leafs are looking more and more like a team that in some ways has played over its head in staying well above .500 for most of the season. Overreaction to only the Maple Leafs' second three-game losing streak of the season? Perhaps. But the feeling is that the prognosis is not good, especially with Ed Belfour, who has more than capably succeeded Curtis Joseph, nursing a bad back and probably starting to feel sensitive about a lack of support -- both from a defensive corps that has drawn Quinn's ire for being passive, and from a struggling attack.

With Alex Mogilny out with a back injury and Mats Sundin looking as if he figuratively has hit a wall, the Maple Leafs have been punchless. They don't have a power-play goal in seven games, and they're 2-for-27 on the power play in the six games Mogilny has missed this season. They haven't scored, period, in 139 minutes and six seconds. Mogilny possibly could play Wednesday night against Carolina, but his return -- whenever it happens -- won't be a cure-all. It also would help if Gary Roberts, such an integral element in the Leafs' character, is able to return as scheduled in February after recovering from offseason shoulder surgeries.

Sundin apparently has recovered from the separated shoulder that kept him out of eight games, but the burden of being so isolated as an offensive threat on this team is affecting the veteran Swede. So while going scoreless in their weekend losses to Buffalo and Colorado, the Leafs cycled and cycled and cycled -- but like a stockbroker riding a health club exercise bike for hours, didn't get anywhere. The line of Sundin with Mikael Renberg and Nikolai Antropov didn't do anything to strike fear in the Avalanche's hearts, and Sundin didn't even have a shot on goal. The back-to-back shutouts were the first suffered by the Leafs since November 1991.

"We've got to get out of this slump," Renberg said in the Leafs' locker room after they were on the wrong end of Patrick Roy's 63rd career shutout. "It's just frustrating when we don't score. When you haven't scored for a while, any time you get the puck you hesitate and you're a half-second too late with the shot."

	“	You can offer all kinds of excuses -- we've been away almost the whole month -- but the fact is we've got to pull it together to try and figure out how to win a hockey game. ”
		— Pat Quinn, Maple Leafs coach/GM

Quinn said that the Leafs are "not dangerous because we're too spread out on our offense and we're too slow to move the puck. You can offer all kinds of excuses -- we've been away almost the whole month -- but the fact is we've got to pull it together to try and figure out how to win a hockey game. Are we mentally tired? Possibly. But we've got to get back to doing what it takes to win."

Sundin's take: "The bottom line is we don't create enough chances. We need some more speed in our offense."

All of this has generated speculation, and outright advocacy, that the Leafs should do whatever it takes -- and that appears to be offering both prospects and serious cash -- to pry Alexei Kovalev away from the Penguins before the March 11 trading deadline. Quinn himself last week talked about an "acquiring mode," but then reacted angrily when Toronto media started speculating about what might be part of a Kovalev deal -- mentioning both Antropov, who fits the profile of a prospect the Penguins could bill as a long-range contributor, and Darcy Tucker.

Now that Kovalev obviously is available, the annual trading-deadline phenomenon is at work: A very good, but certainly not great player, he is being overbilled as a talent, and also perhaps coveted more than he should be because some of the contenders -- in more ways than one -- don't want to see him end up on the roster of a rival. So the usual Western Conference suspects -- Dallas, Colorado and Detroit -- are in the running.

The Maple Leafs haven't made a big-time late-season deal in nearly eight years.

To have any chance of making another significant playoff run, they can't stand pat this time.

Terry Frei is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. His book, Simon and Schuster's "Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming," is available nationwide.