Leafs thankful in overtime
Matthews wins it, Andersen holds fort — it’s a trend
Frederik Andersen was thinking back to the early days of last season. Things weren’t going well in the early throes of his new life as a Maple Leaf. Fresh off signing a five-year deal worth $25 million U.S. after arriving in Toronto in a trade that sent a couple of draft picks to Anaheim, Andersen had been denied a proper training camp thanks to a September injury sustained in an Olympic qualifying game for his native Denmark.
After he allowed five or more goals in three of his first five starts, the effects of his irregular beginning seemed obvious. After he exited a forgettable October with an .876 save percentage and a goalsagainst average inching dangerously close to four, the genius of his acquisition seemed less so.
But when Andersen looked back on that difficult time in the lead-up to Monday night’s game against the Chicago Blackhawks, he didn’t blame his injury misfortunate or his missed training camp. He pointed to his mental approach.
“You keep going back to the first three games last year and in my head it was like, ‘I want to be good. I want to make these big saves.’ But you can’t force them,” Andersen said.
Goaltending, Andersen said, is reactive. It’s not proactive. You can’t create a big save. You have to react to a situation that may or may not put you in a position to make one.
“You can’t take control over anything, really,” Andersen said. “You can only react to what happens in front of you, and then do your job based on that.”
The trick, Andersen said, is continuing to do your job no matter the circumstance — even when you begin a game or a season under less than ideal conditions.
So consider the circumstance in Monday’s 4-3 overtime win over the Blackhawks — a third straight win for the Maple Leafs that came courtesy of a comeback from a 3-1 third-period deficit and an extra-period winner by Auston Matthews. The game was barely eight minutes old before Andersen and his team found themselves down 2-0 on a couple of goals that were hardly glaring errors on the part of the man in the crease — the first Chicago goal bouncing off the tough-luck stick of Mitch Marner, the second on a Jonathan Toews snapper from point-blank range with Andersen’s goal stick lost behind the net.
And perhaps a younger version of Andersen — or a younger assemblage of Leafs — would have been rattled by the ill fortune.
“When you’re younger, you think you’re going to play a 1-0 game every game. In reality, it’s not going to happen,” Andersen said. “It’s a matter of, not getting used to getting scored on, but getting used to processing it and moving on. That’s really what you’ve got to get good at.”
At age 28, it’s fair to say Andersen gives off the confidence of a man moving close to mastering the skill. Not that he’d been the story of Toronto’s early-season success. It had been 100 years since Toronto’s NHL franchise scored a combined 15 goals in the opening two games of a season.
And as exciting as this first-in-acentury offensive explosion has been – the Leafs winning 7-2 and 8-5 against the Jets and Rangers -there are those less than enthralled with the style of play on offer.
Leafs head coach Mike Babcock, for one, has labelled the brand of hockey “fun” but “stupid.” And certainly there’d been plenty of brain-cramp giveaways to underline his less flattering descriptor. So Babcock was setting up Monday night’s game as a measuring stick of sorts. The Blackhawks, after all, had also scored 15 goals in their opening pair of games. But while Chicago had allowed a combined two goals against heading into Monday, the Leafs had allowed seven goals against.
“They score like us, but they defend way better,” Babcock said.
Not on Monday night, when the Leafs dominated possession and outshot the Blackhawks 40-21, even if they couldn’t find their usual touchdown’s worth of offence. Still, it only made sense that Babcock was harping on the negative. Keeping the Maple Leafs humble is going to be a full-time job for the foreseeable seasons to come. And it didn’t hurt the coach’s point that Saturday’s 8-5 win over the Rangers saw the Leafs turn a 5-1 lead into a 5-5 tie. After a 2016-17 season in which the Maple Leafs made a regular mess of turning multi-goal leads into something less than multi-goal wins, the coach certainly didn’t want to see Saturday’s turn of events turn into a habit.
But Andersen, for one, saw the bright side of Saturday’s blown lead.
“I actually liked the game,” Andersen said. “I made some good saves when it was tied 5-5.
Andersen said he was happy about his performance because he rediscovered his own game in the midst of an imperfect evening in which goaltending took its lumps. He might have said the same after Monday’s less-than-ideal start. Before the Leafs found their legs, Andersen stopped Patrick Sharp on a firstperiod breakaway that could have made it 3-0. Still, the Leafs were down 3-1 early in the third period before Connor Brown and James van Riemsdyk scored the goals that pulled them even.
Andersen spoke before the game about how it’s not easy for young goalies to bounce back from rough starts.
“It’s easy for goalies just to call it quits,” he said.
And it was an odd characteristic of last season’s Leafs team that they owned a 3-22-2 record in games they trailed after two periods. So consider Monday night’s comeback a step in a resilient direction.
“When you’re younger, you think you’re going to play a 1-0 game every game. In reality, it’s not going to happen,” Andersen said. “It’s a matter of, not getting used to getting scored on, but getting used to processing it and moving on. That’s really what you’ve got to get good at. It’s the same with pitchers for baseball. No matter what the pitch was before, the next one is the one that counts. You’ve got to have that in your head. It’s a new pitch . . . Nothing that happened before has anything to with what’s going to happen (next).”