Leafs have hope between the pipes
Bernier rebounds, but it’s still too early to stop worrying
LOS ANGELES— It was a little more than a month ago Jonathan Bernier was dealt a humbling blow: The Maple Leafs, having grown weary of his poor play, shipped him to the American Hockey League.
Leafs coach Mike Babcock called it a “conditioning opportunity.” But he might as well have labelled it “rock bottom.” For Bernier, an NHLer just two months into a two-year contract, the “opportunity” was theoretically optional. He could have resisted the team’s suggestion he spend 10 days in the minors searching for the whereabouts of his professional capabilities. He could have refused to play on a Friday night in Rochester in a league he presumed he’d seen the last of during his developmental rise to the world’s best league.
But rather than make a stink, Bernier made the best of it. And as plans go, Month One of the Bernier rehabilitation project seems to be going awfully well.
“You’ve got to give the kid tons of credit, because he’s got his game back,” Mike Babcock, the Maple Leafs coach, was saying on Thursday, before the team’s game against the L.A. Kings.
“All of us go through some tough times in our lives. If you dig in and keep competing and keep working hard, you find your way out.”
With James Reimer slated to start at the Staples Center, Thursday was a rare opportunity for Bernier to take stock of a whirlwind month that has seen him follow up what he characterized as some of his lowest moments as a professional —“It couldn’t get worse,” he said — with a current stretch of prosperity that has seen him emerge victorious in six of his most recent eight starts. In a span of less than three weeks, he has also become the first Maple Leafs goaltender in history to shut out both the Kings and the Ducks in a single season.
After the latter win, Nazem Kadri, the Leafs centreman, said Bernier looked like an athlete who’d rediscovered his “swagger.” Babcock seemed to agree.
“When he starts acting like he’s confident, I’m confident. When he acts like he’s not, I’m not,” said the coach, who added he’s confident enough to start Bernier on Saturday in San Jose.
Bernier, meeting with a couple of reporters on Thursday, spoke like a man who’d just climbed a mountain of sorts.
“Obviously I wish I didn’t have to go through this,” Bernier said. “But that’s part of life, I guess. Sometimes things are not going your way and you’ve just got to keep working hard and keep finding your game. (Going to the minors) was probably the last solution, and it worked out for me in the long run.”
There’s still a long way to go to say it all went smoothly in the long run.
And Bernier hasn’t been the Maple Leafs’ only problem in goal this season. Reimer’s injured groin, which has kept the league leader in save percentage out of all but a couple of spot appearances since late November, has been another unforeseen obstacle to success. Reimer was expected to be in the lineup on Thursday, his first start in more than a month. But twice in the past few weeks Reimer has returned to action presumably healthy only to return to the not-ready-to-go list. So when Reimer spoke the words “I feel ready to go” on Thursday afternoon — well, the statement had to be taken in context.
Even Reimer sounded an ominously cautious note about his impending return to the net.
“Who knows what’s going to transpire throughout the game and whatnot?” Reimer said. “But obviously we’ve done what we can to prepare and we’re good to go.”
If this season’s opening few months have underlined anything for the Maple Leafs, it’s that planning, when it comes to a position that often turns out to be a crapshoot for all but a handful of clubs who can boast perennially elite netminders, often has to be done day to day, moment to moment.
Bernier described his quest to rediscover his game as a series of “baby steps.”
“You know that it’s not gone. It’s just you’ve got to find it again,” Bernier said.
“You’ve had it for so long, you just lose it for a certain amount of time. The hard part is, you don’t know when it’s going to come back. It’s going to happen in a season where you have a couple of bad games and then you bounce back. But (to struggle) for that long — that was the first time in my life. A lot of people reached out. Even from old players to old scouts. I’ve had a lot of support behind me. “So that was nice to see.” Even with his stick-to-it-iveness and his support system, he’s needed some luck to ensure the NHL opportunities he was gifted around the holiday season. Before Thursday’s game, Bernier had appeared in 10 straight matches for the Maple Leafs. But the second appearance in that string wasn’t Babcock’s choice. After Bernier allowed five goals on 27 shots in his first game back from his minor-league stint, Babcock all but declared the conditioning opportunity a flop. With Reimer hurt, the coach named Garret Sparks the Leafs starter for the next game.
“I just think that the puck’s going in, so Sparks will start,” Babcock said at the time. “I thought we had a real good plan, to send (Bernier) down and give him an opportunity to have success. Unfortunately it didn’t go the way he wanted when he arrived back. But it’s pro sport. It’s a hard business. Confidence is fleeting.”
So is a coach’s belief. Bernier only got back into the net because Sparks suffered an injury 11 minutes and 32 seconds into the very next game; Bernier, backing up, allowed three goals on 29 shots in an overtime loss. A couple of days after that relief appearance, Bernier enjoyed a breakthrough — a 5-0 shutout of the Kings that marked his first NHL win in more than eight months. And while Bernier has had some shaky moments since — he’s a only a little more than a week removed from allowing six goals on 15 shots before being chased in a bleak loss to the Islanders — he has managed to bounce back. Then again, Bernier might not have seen a start since if not for Reimer’s intractable groin, which was re-tweaked in thirdperiod relief in that Isles debacle.
In other words, it’s more than a little early to suggest the Leafs’ goaltending troubles are behind them.