Sliding Leafs gone to the dogs
Blue and white, minus injured Gardiner, hear more boos — it’s getting ugly, folks
Coyotes 4
Maple Leafs 2
GAME CENTRE, S5
Man, these are some haggard Maple Leafs.
Scrawny and scuffling. Lost all the roses in their cheeks from a couple of months ago. Starting to look haunted, ashen.
Collars tightening with Sunday night’s raggedy 4-2 submission to the Coyotes, yet another opponent Toronto should have had for breakfast.
What in blazes is happening? Because there’s definitely little fire in the belly of this gang, through just about all of 2019.
And, shiver down the spine, even Freddie Andersen flickered on and off Sunday night, surrendering one cheesy goal on an acute angle while turning to look over the wrong shoulder on another that caromed off some piece of his body, side of the pad or backside.
This is a full funk now, staggering along with a 3-7-0 record since Dec. 29.
Endlessly claiming they’re about to come out of the collective fug; too good for these recent mewling efforts, save for a magisterial performance against league-leading Tampa Bay last week.
Auston Matthews, stuck on his one goal in 13 games schneid, so hopeful for a breakthrough against his hometown club.
“I don’t know. I think we’re going through some adversity as a team. Obviously we want to get out of this as soon as possible. Hopefully in the long run, this is something good for us and we learn from it.
“It just seems night after night these little things that are costing us goals, ending up costing us important points.’’
A wasteland of points, squandered. Thank heavens for all those points racked up through autumn.
John Tavares, who fleetingly knotted it at twos in the third period with his 30th of the season — his first goal in four games, after he got kicked out of the faceoff circle, Zach Hyman turning a nice cameo on the dot — counselled staying the course, even “embracing’’ these helter-skelter days.
“We had a great stretch for a couple of months. Obviously now it doesn’t seem like it’s going our way. We have to just keep pushing forward, doing a lot of the good things we did tonight, cleaning up obviously the mistakes in some of the areas where we weren’t at our best.
Tavares, like his coach, claimed to see positive glimpses in the defeat, a better work ethic and territorial control. Some of us didn’t see that, truthfully.
“After we tied it in the third, they had the momentum the rest of the game,” continued Tavares. “They blocked a lot of shots, we missed the net at times. But I like the approach of the team, the patience, the positive attitude.’’
Three posts the Leafs hit. So there’s that.
An exceedingly tight game this was, no denying. But it’s been a long time — that defeat of the Lightning an exception — since the Leafs have looked in command of a game.
The Scotiabank Arena crowd booed them off the ice, a collective shake of the fist. No Jake to kick around this team, spasmed out of the lineup with back woes. Though, with a few Martin Marincin bungles, it was almost like having Gardiner right there.
The outcome also overtook what had been the bolder face narrative hours earlier — William Nylander as a fixture on the fourth line. Almost made Mike Babcock look like a genius, for the blink of an eye, Nylander securing a point — one point! — for the assist on Travis Dermott’s goal, which opening the scoring in the first. First point since Dec. 11 for the newly clean-shaven Nylander. And oh, he’d been getting an earful of castigation. You know, that crazy generous new contract and all, with nothing but a pipsqueak goal to show for it.
To which I would ask: The $7-million man or the $6million man?
The 22-year-old player into his third season as a Maple Leaf or the 55-year-old coach into his fourth season as bench boss of the Maple Leafs?
Which of the two carries the greater burden for the bust that William Nylander has been since he returned to the team on Dec. 6?
Only one of them is indisputably not going anywhere: Mike Babcock.
Clearly the player is most directly responsible for what he does, or doesn’t do, on the ice. Yet all of that is incumbent on how he’s deployed, on what the coach can pull out of him, on Babcock’s ability to crank up Nylander’s give-a-game meter.
It took Babcock 18 games to admit that his whole strategy may have been off. Nylander did not benefit from playing alongside highly skilled linemates. He may be conditioning fit now, but his performance hasn’t kept pace with his privileges.
On Thursday in Sunset, Fla. and again Sunday night against the Coyotes — until a concussion suffered by Andreas Johnsson threw all the lines a-jumble — Babcock demoted his flailing winger to the fourth line, with a pair of muckers in Frederik Gauthier and Par Lindholm.
It’s arguable whether downshifting Nylander can possibly have its intended effect. But whither-whether Nylander has become a kind of mania.
This is the first existential hockey challenge Babcock has faced since arriving in Toronto as a coaching messiah. It is a test of his mettle, not only fixing Nylander — thus far a big fail — but hauling a team of which so much was expected out of their mid-season doldrums. Maybe, just maybe, Babcock’s system — the stretch passes, only one forward back to help protect the puck in the D-zone as wingers burst up ice, a shrug-off of completing checks in the apparent belief that only takes a player out of the flow, carry the puck rather than dump and chase — is a factor.
Nylander sticks out as a bunion, but Toronto’s recent fall from grace is certainly not all down to him.
Babcock asserts that relegating Nylander isn’t a punishment.
“When I talk to Willy, he knows he’s getting in his own way now,” the coach had said earlier in the day. “So we’re going to take the heat off him. “He knows — he told me — exactly what he’s got to do. He wants to do well, and it’s not going as good. And he hasn’t been able to handle as good as he could. So now we’ve got to help him out.”
Babcock bristled when asked if, in retrospect, he’d mishandled Nylander by throwing him into the fray, alongside top drawer linemates. “Hindsight’s the beauty … that’s the good thing about your job, you get to look at it in hindsight. I don’t get to do that. We tried to do what we could, to get him going the best we could, and it didn’t go, so here we’re at.’’
The view from here, for the Leafs, isn’t pretty.