Carlyle downplays return to Toronto

‘IT’S NOT ABOUT ME’

LANCE HORNBY TORONTO • And now the final act of the Maple Leafs’ eventful five-game home stand: Andy vs. Randy.

With all the interaction between Toronto and Anaheim in trades and hockey office personnel shuffles, there’s never a shortage of reunion angles when these clubs meet. Some of the banter on Monday at the Air Canada Centre will be cordial, such as Frederik Andersen catching up with the Ducks team he won nearly 100 games for in three years.

But Anaheim coach Randy Carlyle will presumably want to show up Toronto club president Brendan Shanahan for pressing thenGM Dave Nonis to fire him almost two years ago.

Carlyle, still the only coach to get the Leafs to the playoffs in the past 12 years, was thinking his edition could’ve turned it around if he was kept in place. They won 19 of their first 31 a few weeks before his dismissal. Yet it was a year and a half in the wilderness before he landed another job — with the Anaheim team he won a Stanley Cup with in 2007.

After Carlyle was let go, the Leafs were simply embarrassing despite the best efforts of interim head coach Peter Horacek. They started from scratch under Mike Babcock.

The fan base is happy with the “Shanaplan” teardown, but it was Carlyle who got the most out of Dion Phaneuf, Phil Kessel and others, who played well up to the end of that fateful Game 7 in the 2013 playoff series against Boston. It has long been a fascinating “what if ” scenario: had Toronto won that night in Beantown and did well against the New York Rangers in the next round, would Carlyle and that group of Leafs have survived?

That must weigh on Carlyle’s mind, but he wasn’t saying much about that Sunday.

“I think it’d be crazy to say (the upcoming game against the Leafs is) not special,” Carlyle told Eric Stephens of the Orange County Register after Anaheim’s 6-4 loss in Detroit. “But again, it’s not about me. It’s about our hockey club going out and playing against the Leafs. That’s where the game is. The sidebars are all what people like to talk about. The reality is what happens on the ice.

“It’s our job to prepare our group to play a hockey club that is playing very well right now, (49) shots last night, won a big game against the Stanley Cup champions, all of those things. They’re feeling good about themselves and we’re not feeling so good about ourselves today.”

Carlyle, whose club remains near the top of the tight Pacific Division, was both traded away by the Leafs as a player (the former first round pick was sent to Pittsburgh in 1978) and fired by the Leafs as a coach.

Carlyle also took over behind the Ducks’ bench after a much younger Babcock left the team, making his name in the NHL and the international stage with a Stanley Cup in Detroit and Olympic gold for Canada.

Toronto hired Carlyle after he was dismissed by the Ducks, as Brian Burke and Nonis left SoCal to head the Leafs’ front office.

Five trades between the teams took place in the calendar years 2013-16, including Andersen and defenceman Jake Gardiner becoming Leafs, with goalie Jonathan Bernier going west. Defenceman Korbinian Holzer, who was traded to the Ducks at the 2015 deadline, is also still with the team.

It’s unclear if Carlyle will want to use Bernier in goal Monday — the Leafs got a conditional draft pick for Bernier in July after his inconsistency aggravated Babcock. In Saturday’s 6-4 loss in Detroit, Bernier was pulled and John Gibson finished up.

The Leafs needed Saturday’s 2-1 overtime win over the Pittsburgh Penguins after their home stand began with three close losses, two coming in shootouts. Winger Mitch Marner, with a multi-point game after an extended scoreboard silence, helped engineer Gardiner’s winner after Toronto killed a 5-on-3 for 2:07 with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin lurking about. Nikita Zaitsev had his first NHL goal.

Fears that some or all of the Leaf rookies would either hit a wall with the schedule or be demoralized by so many razor-thin defeats have been expressed.

“We have young guys and it’s good for their confidence to win these games and see how happy everyone is,” winger Leo Komarov said. “I think we are playing well, it has been close games and now we finally won it.”

The Leafs and Penguins had been leading the NHL in shots per game, but Pittsburgh had nine more wins and 25 more goals before Saturday.

“At the beginning of the year, we were scoring a lot on less shots, now we’re getting lots of shots and not scoring as many,” Leafs centre Nazem Kadri said. “But that evens out over 82 games.”

After Monday, Babcock joked the Leafs are playing on the road “forever” — eight of the next 10.

“We’re not looking too far ahead,” Kadri said. “When we do that, we start to lose focus.

“We just want to focus on the third period and if the game is tied, we’re up a goal or down a goal, we just want to keep our foot on the gas and give ourselves an opportunity to win.” Ducks coach Randy Carlyle is the only Maple Leafs head coach to lead the team to the playoffs in the past 12 years.