Cracking the code for all-rookie line matching could take a while,
As stories about Maple Leaf slumps go, it might be the most positive yarn in recent memory.
This is a rare enough moment in franchise history, after all. As of Thursday afternoon, Toronto’s century-old NHL team, the same club that’s weathered much of a halfcentury of misery while mostly failing to cultivate in-house talent, employed the players who ranked second, third and sixth in NHL rookie scoring. Those players, of course, are William Nylander, Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner.
They’ve been, at their best, awfully exciting to watch. They’ve put up 12, 11 and 10 points in their first 13 games of the season. Broad strokes, big picture, fans ought to be overjoyed.
Still, two of those rookies are struggling through thought-provoking production dips heading into Friday’s home game against the Flyers. Matthews, he of the four-goal opening-night outburst, has zero goals and one assist in his past seven games. Nylander, who has zero goals and three assists over the same seven-game span, spent late chunks of Tuesday’s 7-0 loss to the L.A. Kings on the bench, logging a teamlow 12:06 on the night. And then there’s Zach Hyman, who has started every game on a line with Matthews and Nylander and ranks fourth in NHL rookie ice time. Hyman has zero goals and one assist all told.
There are hockey insiders who look at the way opponents are loading up on Matthews and Nylander and wonder whether Hyman, for all his skills as a puck-retrieving grind guy, might be a better fit elsewhere.
“Right now it seems (Hyman is) hitting too high in the batting order,” said Ray Ferraro, the TSN analyst who watched Tuesday’s game from rink level. “If (Hyman) were with (Nazem) Kadri and (Leo) Komarov, maybe that’s the place for him . . .”
Ferraro, to be clear, wasn’t condemning Leafs head coach Mike Babcock’s repeated allegiances to Hyman, whom Babcock has repeatedly lauded as a big key to the success of the Matthews-Nylander combination.
“Hyman gets ’em the puck,” the coach has said more than once.
Ferraro was simply drawn into a conversation about Babcock’s options, mostly because the coach spent the latter half of Tuesday’s blowout defeat experimenting with a myriad of forward combinations. One of those concoctions had Hyman playing with Kadri and Komarov. Another had Matthews centring a line flanked by Marner and fellow rookie Nikita Soshnikov — a trio that, while they didn’t score, turns heads with promising chemistry.
So while Thursday’s practice saw Babcock go back to the lines he has used for most of the season — “If I would have liked anything I did in (Tuesday’s) game, then we would have done it again,” Babcock insisted — there are those who wouldn’t be surprised to see a change in the offing if certain slumps aren’t promptly busted.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Soshnikov gets a look (with Matthews),” Ferraro said.
Ferraro noted that Matthews once played effectively for the U.S. at the world junior championship alongside Matthew Tkachuk, now of the Flames. He sees the feisty Soshnikov as vaguely similar to Tkachuk in that he’s a “more rambunctious, straightahead but skilled player. Maybe that’s more the style of player that might fit there,” Ferraro said.
But that’s not to say there aren’t tradeoffs. Soshnikov, listed generously at five-foot-11 and 185 pounds —“He’s five-foot-nine,” Ferraro said — isn’t very big, but his heavy release offers a threat Hyman hasn’t so far displayed. Hyman, at six-foot-one and 210 pounds, is bigger and more effective along the boards.
As for Marner, given his off-ice friendship with Matthews — they commute to the rink together — it was no surprise he sounded enthusiastic about his short stint on Matthews’s line Tuesday. “I knew I just had to get my feet moving and create space and both of us were going to work together well,” Marner said.
Which is not to say Marner, who has so far played almost exclusively with Tyler Bozak and James van Riemsdyk, was lobbying for a change. He’s well aware of his place.
“You just listen for your name to be called,” Marner said of NHL life.
As Leafs Nation shakes off a couple of years of apathy and gets back into the business of daily armchair second-guessing of the man calling the names, it’s worth remembering at least a couple of other key points. For one, any line featuring three rookies — and all the options tossed around thus far have Matthews sharing ice time with two fellow neophytes — is bound to have its hiccups. Ferraro knows this from experience.
“I scored in my second NHL game, and I didn’t score for the next 24 games after that. It happens,” said Ferraro, 52, who shook off his rookie slump to net 408 NHL goals in more than 1,200 games.
For another, Babcock sees himself as starved for better options. “The combinations have stayed together longer this year than I’ve ever had before, just because I think guys are suited for certain spots better and we don’t have enough other pieces to interchange them,” he said.
If that wasn’t a not-so-subtle nudge for the folks in the player procurement department, it was certainly a reminder of the reality of a rebuild in progress. The roster, if it’s not constantly under construction, is perpetually under review.
“The Leafs are getting all these kids in and it’s all good news, but it’s not all going to work,” Ferraro said. “Some of it will, and some of it won’t. And you’ll see by the end of the year — oh, wait a minute, the 12 forwards that started the first game, there’s only seven of them here, or eight of them here.”
That’s not to paint a vulgar picture, only to suggest that it’s more than possible that the ideal fixture on Matthews’ wing is not yet a Leaf.