Leafs make something out of nothing
Asked what his young players learned as many made their NHL playoff debuts this week, Maple Leafs head coach Mike Babcock shrugged.
“They find out nothing happens,” Babcock said in the lead-up to Saturday night’s Game 2 of their firstround playoff series with the Capitals.
If it’s not exactly the basis for a sexy marketing campaign, that’s the gist of post-season hockey. A lot of the time, playoff games are one long stalemate.
“For lack of a better word, it might get boring,” said Brian Boyle, the veteran forward. “You go to the net, you go to the net, you go to the net. Nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens.”
And yet, as Boyle said: You keep going to the net in the hope that, on your umpteenth trip, something might come of it. You keep it simple and you keep grinding. And when the opportunities present themselves, you pounce.
Come Saturday’s overtime, that was the kind of hockey on offer — nothing happening on repeat, until something did. But before that? Saturday’s Maple Leafs win, a 4-3 thriller capped by Kasperi Kapanen’s goal in the second extra frame that tied the series at one game apiece, showed the Maple Leafs could also find a way to intersperse some thrilling back-and-forth sequences of high-skill action into their respectably defensive game plan.
Through the halfway point of the second period, the Leafs held the potentially explosive Capitals to a measly 10 shots on goal — as sturdy a defensive performance as you could expect from a team so often maligned for its backline inadequacies. Morgan Rielly was skating like a No. 1 defenceman. Jake Gardiner was making his share of intelligent plays. But the heady efficiency was teamwide.
Nothing happened. And then, in the best parts of the game, everything did. Chances were traded. Post-whistle wrestling matches were sanctioned. One heckuva hockey match ensued. Brian Boyle’s feed to Kapanen, capping a great shift by a fourth line rounded out by Matt Martin, put an exclamation mark on a long, hard night.
The Leafs had said it before the game: They thought they could be better than they’d been in Game 1. On Saturday, buoyed by a stellar performance by goaltender Frederik Andersen, they proved it.
Not that the Leafs were perfect. Washington’s power play, for instance, scored its second goal of the game to put the home team up 2-1 midway through second period. Staying out of the box is going to be a key to this series, especially in the wake of a late-second period hit levied by Washington’s Brooks Orpik that left Toronto defenceman Roman Polak writhing on the ice in pain. Slow-motion replays showed Polak’s right ankle bending in ways that suggested he’ll likely be out for a long time.
A linchpin on the penalty kill, the 30-year-old Czech played more short-handed minutes than any other Leaf this season. The past few months he’d been among the team’s most reliable blueliners. So his loss will have an effect, especially with Nikita Zaitsev, who led the team in ice time this season, still out. Heck, it’s already had an effect. No Leafs defenceman played more than 30 minutes in a game all season. By the end of Saturday’s first overtime, all of Gardiner, Rielly and Matt Hunwick had logged more.
Still, it said something about the resilience of this Leafs team that 40 seconds after Polak was helped to the dressing room, Kapanen scored his first goal of the night to tie it 2-2 — the fourth line effectively grinding, and not for the first time.
There were moments of high-skill niftiness in what was supposed to be a grind-fest. There was Gardiner making a brilliant play off the point to set up the goal that made it 1-0, attacking with veteran patience as the Washington defence collapsed in on itself, ultimately creating the conditions for James van Riemsdyk’s bar-down snipe from in tight. And there was Morgan Rielly scoring the goal that made it 3-2 with a crafty bit of blue-line walking before he found a shooting lane and beat Braden Holtby up high.
Pushing the Capitals to a second straight overtime was a significant achievement. They were the league’s best defensive team during the regular season, allowing 2.18 goals a game. And goaltender Braden Holtby, the career leader in post-season save percentage, had given up more than three goals just twice in his previous 25 playoff games.
The breaks of the game. On the Nicklas Backstrom goal that made it 3-3, a side-door tap-in after the Capitals hemmed the Leafs in their zone for more than a minute, Gardiner had the puck on his stick. And then he didn’t, and Backstrom was celebrating. That’s the bang-bang nature of the game, big goals off small mistakes.
As van Riemsdyk said before the game: “The reality is things happen fast and you have to make a splitsecond decision and split-second reads. You have to put yourself in the position to do the right thing, but there will always be times when you make some mistakes. You always want to learn from those.”
On Saturday night the Leafs looked like a team learning from every shift. They looked confident. At their best, they looked like the better team, the faster team.
But by the end, down to five defencemen and really only playing four regularly, they also looked worn down.
Going forward with another blueliner on the shelf is going to make a hard task harder. Going home with the series tied 1-1 makes it easier to imagine it’s possible.