Leafs crash at 10-game point
Better Marner still odd star out in flop vs. Canes
Mitch Marner is a star. He’s always been a star. There’s that YouTube video from when he was a chubby-cheeked blond bowl-cut kid, and he gets asked if he could score on Curtis Joseph, and nods his head yes. Last year against Nashville he had three points for 15 in his first 16 NHL games, and Mike Babcock said, “I’ve never coached a kid that good that young.” At that point Auston Matthews and William Nylander were three points behind, and were still both playing together, and playing apart.
On Thursday night, Marner lined up on Toronto’s fourth line, with veterans Matt Martin and Dominic Moore. It was their fifth game together. Marner looked like himself in Tuesday’s 3-2 win over Los Angeles: two assists and a disallowed goal that was a spectacular tour de force, in which he made Jake Muzzin and Mike Cammalleri and Jonathan Quick look silly. Marner, still just 20, needed all that.
“I mean, you just feel happy with how you played, and I was happy because I realized I played back to my old self,” said Marner before the Maple Leafs lost 6-3 to the Carolina Hurricanes. “I wasn’t forcing things. I wasn’t throwing the puck away. I think that relaxed me a little bit.”
And then all the Leafs had their confidence shaken. They got outworked, outplayed. Marner was a small part of it: He was on the ice for one shot for and nine and a goal against in the first, when Carolina took a 3-1 lead. He got much better as the game went on; he was sprinkled across a few different lines after Martin left the ice for a spell, and as the Leafs chased. In the first he set up Martin on a rush, but found stone hands; in the second, Tyler Bozak, same thing. Marner looked dangerous in the third, but nothing came of it. On a night where the Leafs chased and needed offence, Marner played 16:28, fourth among Toronto forwards. It was at least a halfstep forward, even if for the team it was a full step back.
“Yeah, I mean, (losing confidence) can happen to anyone,” said Marner. “I mean, obviously, when you have crap games you want to forget about them right away, but the good ones, you feel good for that night and the next morning waking up, but it’s over with now.”
That’s the trick: When you’re struggling, one good game is just that.
Marner has spent his hockey life living up to, and then exceeding, expectations.
He had 61 points in 77 games last season, more even-strength goals than Nylander, the most assists on the team. Now he has to find himself shift to shift, period to period, game to game. Moore and Martin told him to relax against L.A., and it helped. Marner hasn’t actually been bad this season: Coming into this game, Toronto had controlled nearly 57 per cent of shot attempts with Marner on the ice at five-on-five, second-best on the team. He had a goal and five assists. He was also, for whatever it was worth, a team-worst minus-8 in those nine games.
“He’s playing good, but Mitch doesn’t want to play on the fourth line,” said Babcock. “We don’t necessarily want him on the fourth line. We want to play him enough that he’s important to the team. We thought we played him enough last game that he was important, had a huge impact on it. In games prior to that, he’d made real good back-door passes for empty-net goals. He actually had three of ’em, and they didn’t go in. So you think you’re snakebitten, but he wasn’t, really. They just didn’t go in.
“But I say this all the time: It’s never as good as you think, it’s never as bad as you think. It’s always somewhere in between. Just keep on, and if you’re a good player it’ll all turn good.”
And he’s good, so this won’t last. Same with the Leafs, actually. But it underscores the biggest drawback for Marner: He doesn’t get to play with Matthews. Underlying all this is that as much as they’re teammates, Marner is competing with Nylander and, to a lesser degree, Matthews. They’re all going to get paid, but the dollar amounts have yet to be negotiated. Babcock believes in pairs, and though he played Marner and Matthews together in a few spots last year, he didn’t pair the master playmaker with the master finisher, even though they’re buddies.
No, Nylander gets to ride shotgun with Matthews, which means Marner has to make his own way. Which means playing with Bozak and James van Riemsdyk, a pair, and a line where Marner is the best puck retriever available. Or with Martin and Moore, two older dogs with a combined 151 goals in 1,384 career games, or just under nine goals per 82 games played.
Even a star’s confidence can waver. And for Toronto there’s a big difference between having two stars, and three. It’s a reminder: Not everyone is Auston Matthews. In fact, almost nobody is. It’s rare for anybody, or any team, to travel in a straight line upwards, uninterrupted. There are bad losses, bad stretches, bad times. Mitch Marner is a star. He’s not fallen, but he still has so much room to rise.