Diamonds in rough times
Soshnikov, Hyman, Nylander offer hope for Toronto’s future
You can call it a tank job, these dregs of a last-place Maple Leafs season. But it’s also a teaching gig. Mike Babcock will tell you he’s trying to win every game once the puck drops. But in between, he and his staff have also been running an ad-hoc training camp of sorts for the handful of prospects who’ve joined the fray. In some ways, that doesn’t make it less ugly. When this season is referenced in a year- by-year index of the club’s results, it’ll look like another in a line of lost causes. And Wednesday’s 4-3 shootout win over the Islanders, Toronto’s third victory in the past 16 games, hardly took the edge off the statistical futility.
But the hope is there’ll be some payback for the pain beyond optimal draftlottery odds and the occasional dubya. The hope is that future Maple Leafs will remember these waning weeks as the time they began to find their NHL selves.
Judging from the early returns, some searches of professional discovery will take longer than others. Zach Hyman, for one, already has found his NHL niche.
The 23-year-old rookie is a committed grind guy. And on Wednesday he scored his second career NHL goal in the same way he scored his first — banging in a rebound, in this particular instance while holding his ground in the space between two big-time NHL defencemen, Nick Leddy and Johnny Boychuk.
Babcock has said that, in any given year, one player always emerges as the coach’s favourite: “It’s the guy who works the hardest.”
Hyman, who’s relentless on the cycle and a more than serviceable skater, has the look of the tireless type who could be that guy for years to come. Mind you, he’ll be in stern competition with Nikita Soshnikov, the 21-year-old neophyte who, along with liking the muck, provided the nifty backhand move that was the decisive strike in Wednesday’s shootout.
“Hyman and Sosh are here to stay,” Babcock said after the game. “They’re real players. They’re gonna play. They’re just too good and too hard and too fast with too much work ethic.”
Precisely what William Nylander will be as an NHLer is more difficult to project. Small, skilled players who’ve torn up the minor leagues bring with them uncertainty. For all his obvious talent — he’s already shown himself to be dynamite in bursts, and on Wednesday night he banged in the late-game, 6-on-4 goal that forced overtime for his second career goal — he is nobody’s idea of a two-way savant. That doesn’t make him uncommon. When it comes to the 200 feet of responsibility that comes with being an NHL centreman, the jump to the big leagues presents a cliff-steep learning curve.
It’s a theme that’s nearly as ancient as the game. As Brad Boyes, the veteran Maple Leafs forward, was saying on Wednesday, “You get to this place by being offensive, scoring goals.” But you can’t stay in this place unless you can do your part to prevent them.
“You’ve got to learn (the defensive side of the game),” Boyes said. “Or you won’t play.” In an ideal world, Babcock said this week, Nylander would be making his debut on the wing; it’s just easier. Babcock said even some top NHL centres “started as wingers and had a tough time initially,” especially on the defensive side of the ledger.
“The problem with this league is if you turn it over or don’t play well defensively, they spend your whole shift in your zone and you change and the minuses add up,” Babcock said.
Part of the challenge of navigating NHL ice comes on what players call defensive “sort-outs” — the sorting out of who’s responsible for whom when the other team has the puck.
“Sometimes it seems like the pieces and the players are moving really fast,” said Brooks Laich, the newly arrived veteran. “Just being able to process that, and find your check, get body position and make a good read. (Nylander will) figure it out. It’s probably one of the hardest things to learn coming in.”
Said Boyes: “If you’re a smaller guy you’ve got to be real nasty or you’ve got to be real smart. You’ve got to be able to play the angles properly, use body position. If you’re smart enough to figure out how you get stopped in the offensive zone and you can apply that to the defensive side, then it helps.”
Nylander, who doesn’t seem particularly menacing, will need to rely on grey matter.
“Offensively skilled guys, guys with high hockey IQs, can figure that stuff out quick,” Boyes said.
Another challenge comes in the faceoff circle. Nylander came into Wednesday’s game having won 45.5 per cent of his faceoffs — hardly horrible for a neophyte, but a lessthan-ideal figure. Wednesday’s work on the dot, when he won just 7-of-16 for a 44 per cent night, suggested progress might not be immediate.
Still, Babcock called the game Nylander’s best in six as a Leaf “by a mile.”
“It’s the first time he skated since he’s been here,” said the coach. “Obviously he’s a huge talent.”
If the reviews haven’t always been glowing, the 19-year-old hasn’t sounded fazed.
“It hasn’t really been that much harder than I thought. I mean, I’m not saying it’s easy,” Nylander said in the lead-up to Wednesday’s game. “But you’ve got some chances against you where they probably could have scored a couple of goals. I mean, you’re learning every day from some mistakes.”
As the Leafs make their annual death march toward April tee times, those learning opportunities are the consolation prize not named Auston Matthews. Nobody connected to the organization is expecting domination; the goal is education. So far the students seem both gifted and willing.