Risky play dumps club in danger zone

As the Maple Leafs landed here this week for their annual multi-day stay in Southern California, Maple Leafs goaltender Frederik Andersen found himself back in a familiar habitat.

Andersen spends his off-seasons in nearby Newport Beach and appreciates the upsides of oceanside life. But given he grew up in a landlocked part of Denmark, his Pacific-ness has its limits. Unlike many an NHLer who has resided in these parts — among them soon-tobe hall of famers Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne — Andersen hasn’t taken to surfing. He hasn’t even tried it.

“I would try it, but I don’t like to go in the ocean,” Andersen was saying recently.

Why? It’s the sharks — and not the upper-case, San Jose variety. “I know all these stats about the low risk — it’s more dangerous driving your car than (going in the water), and stuff like that,” Andersen said. “But the risk is literally zero per cent if you stay out of the ocean.”

Risk management happens to be an issue of the moment in Leafland — and not simply on matters of free-time prudence. Consider Monday’s 3-2 defeat in San Jose, Toronto’s fourth loss in five games, after which head coach Mike Babcock repeated a refrain that’s becoming awfully familiar.

“We turned the puck over too much,” was Babcock’s summation of Toronto’s troubles.

This has been an ongoing battle between the coaching staff and the players. Babcock and his assistants are pushing their quick-striking, skill-laden roster to play a simpler, more vanilla style. They’re asking for less high-risk playmaking around the opposition blue line and more dump-and-chase grinding deep in the offensive zone. Stock NHL tactics, basically.

And yet the instincts of many of Toronto’s best players lean the opposite way. Such is the talent of many Maple Leafs that they’ve yet to see a neutral-zone trap that a bit of fancy stickhandling can’t penetrate.

“I’ll speak for myself — you want to be able to enter the zone with possession,” Nazem Kadri, the Leafs centreman, said Tuesday.

But even Kadri, now a 27-year-old veteran, acknowledges that, given the state of NHL defensive schemes, trying to enter the zone with possession — when the zone is guarded by a five-man wall around the blue line — can seem more death-defying than a surfing safari among the great whites.

“Teams now, they’re clogging the neutral zone, stacking five at their blue line. And it’s becoming harder and harder to enter with possession,” Kadri said. “So we’ve just got to wrap our head around getting the puck in deep and getting more chances off the cycle.”

Perhaps to help facilitate the emphasis on simpler play — or to spark a team that was grossly outshot 38-18 on Monday — Babcock shuffled his lineup as the team practised ahead of Wednesday’s game against the Ducks at the Honda Center. Among the key changes, Patrick Marleau was centring a line with James van Riemsdyk and Connor Brown; Kadri was flanked by wingers Josh Leivo and Leo Komarov; and Tyler Bozak was demoted to the role of fourth-line centre, with Mitch Marner and Matt Martin at his flanks. Only the top line of Auston Matthews, William Nylander and Zach Hyman remained untouched.

There were changes on defence, too. Connor Carrick, who’d being sitting out as a healthy scratch, was paired with Jake Gardiner, Morgan Rielly with Ron Hainsey, and Nikita Zaitsev with Andreas Borgman.

“We weren’t good enough (Monday),” Babcock said. “And when that’s been a consistent theme of late, it’s time for change.”

While the Maple Leafs have seen a 7-2-0 start turn into a 7-5-0 slump, there’s a feeling that, for all its promise, this is a team still learning the finer points of consistent NHL excellence.

“We’ve still got a long way to go — we knew that when we were 7-2,” said Carrick. “Even when we were winning, there was kind of a but (attached). ‘Hey, we outscored ’em, but . . . we weren’t happy with the amount of blue-line turnovers that we had.’ When you’re losing, you’re forced to face that.”

Even before three straight losses, mind you, the coaching staff had been repeatedly selling the virtues of a lower-risk approach. Maybe now it’ll be an easier transaction.

“The coaching staff, they’re like lawyers. They’re always trying to help you understand and believe their argument,” Carrick said. “So they’re going to show video. ‘You guys like offence? Here’s us making a risky play at the opposing blue line. There’s a turnover. Freeze the frame. Where are you guys?’ We’re backchecking. ‘Are you playing offence while you’re backchecking?’ No. ‘Does anybody like backchecking?’ Probably not. Versus that same scenario, but you chip it past the opposing D-man with speed. ‘Freeze the frame. Where are we?’ In the offensive zone. ‘What are we doing?’ We’re cycling. ‘Who prefers backchecking to cycling?’ Nobody. When it stares you in the face, it’s hard to deny.”

In other words: Go lighter on the highlight-reel, home-run feeds through the forest of sticks — passes that can be promptly intercepted and transformed into opposing odd-man rushes — and heavier on the simpler options that might lead to quality time in the offensive zone. Carrick put the stylistic ask in terms of a boxing match: “Sometimes you’ve got to rope-a-dope, hang in and throw jabs. You can’t throw haymakers every shift.”

It’s easier said than done, of course. As Bozak was saying on Tuesday: “There’s a ton of skill in here, so obviously you want to make plays. It’s hard to dump it in all the time when plays are available.”

Dumping it in, after all, is a boilerplate option that doesn’t appeal to the artist inside many a Leaf. And Babcock is aware of the resistance.

“We’re stubborn about it,” Babcock said after Monday’s loss. “One of the things I think we should take out of tonight’s game is (the Sharks) have a good, veteran leadership group here and what do they do with the puck every single time? They put it in more than any team we’ve ever played against. They didn’t turn it over.”

It’s an NHL truism: Boring often prevails. Playing in the shallow end with a life-jacket makes more sense than the hockey equivalent of riding the big waves in the merciless churn.

“The good teams — they’re OK with the fact that it’s a little boring. They keep it simple, simple, simple,” Carrick said.

And given that the Leafs, to a man, claim to aspire to be one of the good teams, change promises to be coming — not just to the line combinations, but to the way they play.

“It can be (boring) to play that way,” Kadri said. “But it’s not boring to win.”