Leafs skate through the darkest day
Power failure can’t interrupt ‘penance’ for loss to Kings
Forty-seven minutes into the hardest practice of the Mike Babcock era — forty-seven minutes into an unceasing workout heavy on all-out skating and non-stop pushing — an odd thing happened.
The power went out at the Maple Leafs practice facility in Etobicoke. The ice surface was pitch black for a moment, then slightly less black as the emergency lights kicked in. And there were those who figured the unforeseen logistical issue might call a premature end to a gruelling sweatfest. Babcock, the whistle-toting head coach, had been putting his team through what he called “a little penance” — a punishment for a 7-0 loss to L.A. the night before in which Babcock condemned his players for embarrassing themselves in front of their home crowd. Nobody in equipment would have been sad to see Wednesday’s session end.
“When the lights went off I thought there might be a chance we’d hit the dressing room,” Nazem Kadri said later. “But it turns out we had a little more work to do.”
That’d be stops and starts in the neardark, a spectacle that was reminiscent of the dimly lit bag-skate scene in the Hollywood movie about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. That story, of course, climaxes with the immortal call, “Do you believe in miracles?” Let’s just say if Al Michaels had been doing play-by-play at Wednesday’s practice, his crescendo would have been slightly less timeless. Something like: “Do you believe in battle drills?”
Babcock, who believes in them deeply and put his team through a scathing series of mano-a-mano tests to atone for Tuesday’s touchdown loss, was asked later if he had considered stopping practice given his players’ severely reduced ability to see one another.
“We did stop practice. We stopped the drill we were doing and just did a little skating,” the coach said. “Why? They can’t skate in the dark?” Oh, they can. And they did. They skated from goal line to blue line to goal line. Repeat. They skated from goal line to red line to goal line. Repeat. But the torture only lasted another five minutes or so, for a grand total of 51 minutes of comeuppance. It said something that Babcock didn’t spend any pre-practice time showing his team video of Tuesday night’s mistakes. The coach was of the mind that the errors weren’t of tactical design but of inherent desire.
“We needed to work and compete,” Babcock said. “If we didn’t want to do it at night, we might as well do it in the day.”
Maybe Toronto’s worst loss of the season didn’t get the city-wide attention it otherwise might have, given Tuesday’s events of global significance south of the border.
The Leafs had a bad night at the office, sure. But U.S. pollsters had a shoddier one.
Still, it couldn’t have made anyone in blue and white feel good that the Kings, who had been struggling to score, unleashed a goal-after-goal tsunami. And it shouldn’t have gone unnoticed that various Kings only left the rink after implicitly dismissing Eastern Conference hockey as soft hockey. Jeff Carter mocked Eastern games as “track meets” — as in, plenty of speed on display but no body contact to be encountered.
Babcock, for his part, had a harsher laundry list of complaints.
“We never got on the inside. Never shot the puck. Never competed. Never won any battles on the (offensive) zone. We were light and easy to play against, and that was all of us,” said the coach, who also dismissed the power play as “uncompetitive” and the forecheck as almost nonexistent. (For the record, he was pleased with the penalty kill.)
“We’re not playing like that,” Babcock said. “It’s unacceptable to play like that. It’s un-Leaf-like, as far as I’m concerned now. And we’re not playing like that.”
The hope around the team was that Tuesday’s game was a rare one-off — the way last season’s 5-0 win over L.A. didn’t go on to define either team’s season. Toronto had won its previous three games before facing the Kings this time around. Everyone connected to the club was feeling good. Until they weren’t.
“There’s no sugar-coating it. We just kind of laid an egg,” Kadri said. “You’ve got to . . . be consistent in the NHL. That’s what good contending teams do. It’s still early. We’re still learning.”
Kadri figured Babcock’s workout was designed to get the team “back into the groove.” There were pure skating drills, sprints from blue line to blue line, sprints around the net, sprints on the whistle after a tight turn. There was one-on-one work along the boards. There was a 2on-0 rink-length rush accompanied by a chasing pair of defenders.
And if much of it looked designed to improve on what the Leafs lacked on Tuesday, some of it might have been was designed to be unpleasant.
“I don’t think it hurt that it was pretty hard on your body as well,” Kadri said.
Sixteen minutes into the proceed- ings, the surface was already well-chewed, thick with piles of snow, and the puck had already stopped sliding without a strong push.
As one long-time observer of the game remarked: “That ice is going to feel like sand real soon.”
Twenty-seven minutes in, speaking of desert-like conditions, Babcock allowed for a brief water break.
And twenty minutes later, after a frenzy of near-perpetual motion, the place went dark.
Kadri wasn’t the only Leaf with designs on an earlier shower. “I was thinking, ‘Thank goodness. We’re getting off the ice,’” said Jake Gardiner.
Maybe it says something about the quick-learning nature of Toronto’s youngsters that at least one rookie wasn’t as optimistic. “I didn’t think we were going to get a break,” said forward William Nylander. “I was expecting to keep skating.”
And they did.