Coach Carlyle the visionary, who knew?
TORONTO — Among the many people who knew that the Toronto Maple Leafs played a flawed brand of hockey was Randy Carlyle.
The team’s fortunate luck, the now-deposed head coach said, “is going to turn against us if we continue to play to the level that we’re playing.”
That quote was from October. October of 2013. One of the strange postscripts to Carlyle’s time in Toronto is that, although he spent the better part of two years insisting that he wanted his charges to play a more defensively sound game, he appeared to have no idea how to make that happen — even though one of his new assistants this season, Peter Horachek, has managed to pull it off more or less instantly.
The first seven games under Horachek, who was made interim head coach when Carlyle was dismissed on Jan. 6, have for Toronto fans been like the middle third of a Michael Bay movie: the heroes are vanquished, searching for answers, picking up dead bodies amid the rubble. Some of those Leafs games have included responsible, disciplined play, some were duds by any measure, but suddenly shaky goaltending and a stretch of bad luck for the team’s shooters have combined for a 1-6 record under Horachek and pushed the Leafs from the fringes of the playoff race to barely able to sniff it. Because this is Toronto and a simple losing streak is not enough, there is now the added controversial element of swift justice being levied against the three dim bulbs who saw fit to toss Leafs jerseys onto the ice in a 4-1 loss to Carolina on Monday. (The punishment includes a one-year ban from any event at the Air Canada Centre. If you do it again, you get a twoyear ban. Sorry, I’ll show myself out now.)
Horachek deserves credit for showing some resolve amid the wreckage and the bomb craters. Fresh off the ugly result against Carolina, which capped a fivegame stretch in which his team scored two goals, the coach was asked if he would consider letting his players revert to their former wideopen style.
Horachek, who really does have the bearing of a first-rate homicide cop, was blunt in response: “No.”
“I don’t think any of the good teams in the league play that way,” he said.
No, they do not. Chicago, Tampa Bay, Detroit, the New York Islanders: all are among the league leaders in terms of controlling the play as measured by shot differential. And the 16 teams that would qualify for the playoffs if they began tomorrow closely align with the top 16 puckpossession teams, with a few exceptions. Minnesota has a strong shot differential, but is outside the playoff bubble because its goaltending has been a disaster. The defending champion L.A. Kings control the puck, but are just outside the playoff bracket due to an absurd 12 losses in overtime or a shootout.
So Horachek is right, particularly so when he says, as he did on Monday night, that playing strong defence does not necessarily mean sacrificing offence. The idea is to limit an opponent’s chances and create offence by forcing turnovers. Ken Hitchcock, the St. Louis Blues coach, said much the same thing on Saturday just before his team drilled Toronto: stifle the other guy’s offence and your own goals will come in time. “He knows what he’s doing,” Hitchcock said of Horachek.
But the problem with Toronto’s mid-season lab experiment to test the merits of possession-oriented hockey is that Horachek has not been handed a particularly great set of mice. It’s still a team that has a third-line centre playing on its top line, an awkward mix of defencemen and David Clarkson sucking up more than $5 million US a year in cap space.
The Leafs want to be a four-line team, but against Carolina they had Matt Frattin playing just three minutes and Sam Carrick contributing all of 2:17. It is a troubling sign and not a good reflection on general manager Dave Nonis when the Hurricanes, who came into the game tied with the league’s third-lowest point total, display far more forward depth. Carolina had only one player with fewer than 12 minutes of ice time against the Leafs. (Brad Malone and he scored.) These are the Toronto Regressions, who on Dec. 19 had a goal differential on the season of plus 22. Sixteen games later, they are at minus 7.
Toronto’s new style of play should make them a better team over the long run, provided Horachek can keep the Leafs committed to it: he’s already talking about how some of them are “cheating” the system to try to score a quick goal and are instead giving up chances the other way. This is why it would have made sense to install a new system in, say, the off-season, when instead Toronto gave a contract extension to Carlyle.
But the style alone won’t solve things. At some point, the roster will also need to be addressed. As will be, one imagines, the person who assembled it in the first place.