Maple Leafs are existing in a comfortable limbo
You could forgive this team for occasionally looking like it’s waiting for big show to start
TORONTO — Frederik Andersen won’t say he is tired, and maybe he isn’t. He’s cagey, Freddie.
You can start a sentence saying, well you guys pretty much know who you’re getting in the first round, and the big Danish goaltender will say, “Well first of all, I don’t know who we’re playing yet,” which is how you could tell he is a mathematical literalist. That, he tells himself, is future Freddie’s problem. He has work to do today.
“(It’s) definitely a little different, especially in our division, with two runaway teams, and we’re pacing right behind them,” says Andersen, the most important Toronto Maple Leaf. “That’s the challenge of coming in and trying to focus on what you’re doing today, rather than thinking about tomorrow. today was a chance to get better, and that’s the way we’ve got to approach a season like this, because if you start to look too much big picture, you’re going to lose focus on what’s important right now, and that’s to get better today, and recover for Saturday.”
It’s been a weird year. For months the Leafs have known they are playing the Boston Bruins in the first round, or the Tampa Bay Lightning. The standings fiddle around from night to night, but that means either the thirdbest team in the NHL or the second-best team, in the first round. Enjoy.
So all year — through all the ups and downs, through the worries of playing too fast or too slow, through the worries about overplaying
Leo Komarov (now at home on the fourth line) or underplaying Mitch Marner (leading the team in scoring in 16 minutes a night, seeming salary suppressive tactics be damned), and in truth, in part because of those decisions — the Leafs have existed in this in-between world, this comfortable limbo, where nothing much matters and everything does. They can win 13 of 15, as they did in January and February, and not move up. They can lose four straight, as they just have, and it’s OK. They’re finishing third. You could forgive this team for occasionally looking like it’s waiting for the big show to start.
“I’m sure our coach would agree with you,” says defenceman
Connor Carrick. “I’m sure he’s seen games and gone, hey, that looks like a complacent group to me. But I’m not sure that there’s maybe a conscious effort to pace yourself. Maybe subconscious, like self-preservation. It’s a long year.
“I mean that’s the nature of sport, is that there’s a certain rhythm to it, and there’s an art form in staying in it every night and deciding how you’re going to maintain your A game every day, and how do you improve your A game every day. And I think we’ve been consistent in terms of our trajectory, I would say, but I think we’d like to ramp it up and get on a run at the end, take a charge, put some heat.”
Of all the guys who need to
balance self-preservation and ambition, Andersen is No. 1. Other can share the load; he can’t, not often. Tampa’s goalie, Andrei Vasilevskiy, is admitting he’s tired and he’s faced 643 fewer shots in 18 fewer games in his two years as a full-time starter, and he’s five years younger.
But Freddie is focusing on being ready for Boston or for the Lightning, whomever. The division playoff system was dumb when No. 1 Washington played No. 2 Pittsburgh in the second round last year, and it’s dumb now. Three of the six best teams in hockey are in the Atlantic — the Central, with Nashville Winnipeg and Minnesota, is the other death trap — so it’s the Atlantic’s turn.
So the Leafs have to escape the Atlantic, or try again next year. It’s been the simple, arduous task all year.
As Carrick says of their ambitions, “It’s our job to understand that, and know it’s not true unless it’s true. You’re not a good team unless you’re a good team. And luckily we’ve stayed in the conversation to this point, but there’s a whole different conversation for the favourite, the heavyweight, the team that the other team doesn’t even really believe they have a chance against.”
Maybe the Leafs could have been that, but they’re the scrappy underdog instead, and they will need to have all the right habits in place when the tests come. That’s why Andersen went off that night in Philadelphia in late January, when we said stuff like, “I think we’ve got to look each other in the eyes here and determine where we want to go from here.”
He said he thought they took last year’s success a little bit for granted, before getting going in February. Maybe that’s why he won’t rest.
“Everyone talks about how you can’t just turn on the switch, and that’s really how it is,” Andersen says.
He is their big Danish conscience, in a way: the big serious man who shoulders more than anybody else, and who, if he falters, the whole thing falls apart. The Leafs should probably rest Andersen down the stretch, since he’s leading the league in shots faced, after being second last year. If there is an advantage to being the third horse in a threedivision race, it’s that.
But they seem disinclined, and he won’t admit he’s tired anyway. Hopefully, Freddie is telling the truth.
All that’s riding on it, probably, is the season.