Leafs are anything but special in loss
Toronto struggles on the power play and the penalty kill but still escapes Florida with a point
You know you’re in a hopeless hockey market when the Maple Leafs roll into town and the Florida Panthers announce they’re celebrating something known as “Legacy Saturday.”
What’s it matter that there are Taco Bell franchises with grander traditions and better in-seat ambience than an NHL team born in 1993? Marketing departments must market. So Saturday’s “Legacy” honouree was Bryan McCabe, the former Maple Leafs defenceman, who dropped the ceremonial first puck. If you were fuzzy on McCabe’s connection to the Panthers, he played a grand total of 199 games with the team — approximately 18% of his great NHL career. He played nearly three times as many games in Toronto, playoffs included.
And that wasn’t even the night’s chief abomination: One of the possible answers to a second-intermission hockeytrivia challenge was Leafs legend Wendel Clark. They spelled it “Clarke.”
Which is to say: “Legacy” might not have been the precise word the Pan- thers were searching for when they had their promotional brainwave. Victory Saturday would have worked, though, as the Panthers handed the Maple Leafs their fourth loss in five games, 4-3 in overtime.
Saturday, mind you, was a moment to use air quotes around plenty of questionable terminology. Yes, Zach Hyman “dropped the gloves” in his first game back from a two-game suspension.
But even though Hyman threw a half-hearted punch in his net-front tussle with Keith Yandle, this after Hyman took a goaltender-interference penalty for knocking over Roberto Luongo, the officials couldn’t hand out a fighting major with a straight face. Roughing it was.
And, yes, the Maple Leafs deployed both a penalty kill and a power play on Saturday night. But their “special” teams have been especially awful of late. The alleged penalty killers offered only token resistance to a Panthers power play that scored on two of its first three opportunities to take a 2-0 lead. That’s four straight games the Maple Leafs have given up at least one goal while shorthanded.
The slumping Maple Leafs power play, meanwhile, also continued its swoon. Even gifted a four-minute advantage in the second period, it couldn’t bust loose, somehow finding itself outshot 3-2. Blanked on four opportunities all told, Toronto is now one for its last 22 attempts with the man advantage.
Which isn’t to take away credit from Aleksander Barkov, whose hat trick, including the overtime winner, powered the Panthers to their first win in five games and who, in the opin- ion of Maple Leafs coach Mike Babcock, was the best player on the ice “by 10 miles.”
“He’s got a lot of skill. He’s got a lot of moves. He’s fast. He’s a deadly player out there,” said Mitch Marner, whose two third-period goals, one with Frederik Andersen on the bench with 1:40 to go, helped salvage a point. “He plays both sides of the puck really well. We knew that going into the game. He got open twice and didn’t miss them.”
Couldn’t say the same for the Leafs on the power play.
“We just seemed a little flat tonight and those things are going to happen sometimes,” said Leafs centreman John Tavares said. “Unfortunately we didn’t win the special teams battle. I think that was a big part of it today. There wasn’t much five on five.”
Five on five, to Tavares’s point, the Maple Leafs were the better team on Saturday night. They won the puck-possession battle. They racked up18 high-danger scoring chances to Florida’s four, according to NaturalStatTrick.com.
Oh, and they outscored the Panthers 2-1.
But with manpower imbalances, the Panthers were the better team.
So what’s going on with Toronto’s penalty kill? Ron Hainsey, the man-short regular, said before the game that the team is "not particularly satisfied” with its work. Toronto came into the game ranked 15th in the league in penalty-kill percentage. But you can argue it’s worse than that. According to NaturalStatTrick.com, Toronto’s penalty killers had given up scoring chances at the fifth-highest rate in the league heading into Saturday.
"There are plenty of things we can improve on,” Hainsey said. “We’re continuing to work at it, but at this point it’s at is average at best." What has to be better? “Two-hundred-foot clears, faceoffs and just sticking to the scheme,” Babcock said. “I don’t disagree with (Hainsey). It hasn’t been as good as it was. It was on fire. And then hasn’t been as good. So we’ll just have to get back at it. But I think you go through ebbs and flows each year. Let’s just keep steady on the rudder and let’s just keep going and find ways to im- prove.”
The power play has been ebbing of late, too, although Toronto’s man-advantage units were actually rather effective in Thursday’s 4-1 loss in Tampa Bay, where goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy was a one-man penalty-killing machine in a 48save gem.
Still, on Saturday Toronto managed just four shots in four power-play opportunities. Or should we say, “opportunities.” At times the Panthers seemed like the more likely team to score with one of their own in the box. It’s a problem that’ll need correcting if the Maple Leafs are going to put together a season worthy of the franchise’s legacy.
“They scored on their power plays. We have to be better on ours,” said Marner. “Ours weren’t good enough. It’s something we have to watch. It’s something we have to be better at and something we can always improve on. I thought we had a couple good looks (on the power play). Bounces didn’t go our way.
“I think from our standpoint I have to get more shots to the net. I think we have to move the puck better, move our feet more in the (offensive) zone and make it harder on their team. But it’s something I think we can improve on and something we can be better at.”
“We just seemed a little flat tonight and those things are going to happen sometimes. We didn’t win the special teams battle.” JOHN TAVARES