The wily Coyotes create a template for frustrating Toronto
The Arizona Coyotes sure know how to ruin a good party.
The Coyotes rode secondperiod goals from Alex Galchenyuk and Josh Archibald to a 2-0 win over the Maple Leafs on Saturday, spoiling Auston Matthews’ return home.
Aa formidable crowd wearing blue and white — contributing to a sold-out Gila River Arena — had hoped to see the kind of high-octane road show the Leafs had brought to previous stops on their six-game trip.
But Matthews and the rest of the Leafs were held off the scoresheet after piling up 27 goals in their previous six games. They fired 21 shots at Darcy Kuemper on Saturday, and played the final three minutes with Frederik Andersen pulled for the extra attacker.
“It’s frustrating for sure,” Matthews said. “You come back here, for myself definitely, you want to perform, you want to win the game. We really just didn’t have it. They outworked us in a lot of areas, and we really didn’t have an answer.”
The result means the Leafs are 3-2-0 on this road trip and still in a battle with the Boston Bruins for home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs.
Rival coaches might want to look at the tape and see how it was the Coyotes swept both games against Toronto this season.
The template: aggressive forechecking, cycling the puck in the offensive zone, and a top-notch penalty kill that gives the puckhandlers very little time or space.
“They had their game plan, we had ours,” Matthews said. “We played right into theirs. They sat back and let us beat ourselves, make our mistakes and then come back the other way. We could have made adjustments in-game, but we kept doing the same thing over and over again.
“They outworked us and definitely, at times in the game, they outsmarted us as well.”
Turning point: The Coyotes had thoroughly outplayed the Leafs until there was 6:07 left in the second, when Oliver Ekman-Larsson was called for a double minor for high-sticking Connor Brown. The Leafs power play managed four shots, but only one real scoring chance. The Coyotes, owners of the league’s best penalty kill on home ice, killed the double minor and stopped any chance ofmomentum.
The Leafs went 0-for-4 on the power play.
Line blender: Leafs coach Mike Babcock mixed his top three lines to start the third period, and almost hit some magic when William Nylander appeared to have scored, but it was ruled no goal due to a high stick. The bounces that had gone their wall earlier in the week didn’t on Saturday.
Coach’s corner: “I thought we came out real good, owned the puck for eight straight minutes. That was it for the night. The next 52 were theirs. They played harder. They were above the puck. They did things right. They did exactly what we said they were going to do. We had a plan for success against them. We didn’t work hard enough to make that happen.” — Babcock, on the Leafs’ effort.
Up next: The Leafs hang around Arizona for a couple of days before heading to St. Louis for the road-trip wrap-up game Tuesday night.