Andersen could use backup
Without a little help from his friends, goalie had to fight through traffic, again
It was a heart-racing blur of saves. Not a cheapo in the bunch. Four stops by Freddie Andersen inside of 10 seconds, midway through the second period on Saturday, the last one a desperate fling of the toe against Max Domi’s bid to put Montreal up 4-1.
In the freeze frame of memory, the Ginger Man claimed he had clear recall of that frenzied sequence. “Yeah. Sort of.”
“I tried to keep sliding over, get my pad on that last one,” Andersen said. “You’ve just got to try to stick with it. We battled and got the puck out of there. It was a fun sequence.” Ha, ha. Some fun. He made 32 saves whilst simultaneously contending with exceptionally aggressive crowding of his crease by the Canadiens, endlessly jostled and, frankly, manhandled because his teammates continue to do a poor job of clearing the trenches. And we were all reminded yet again of how crucial the great Dane is to Toronto’s aspirations. Andersen’s clutch guarding of the cage allowed his teammates to rally from 3-0 hole and snap a three-game losing streak, their longest of the season.
Andersen is, on the evidence, the Leafs MVP and well within the Vézina discussion, after finishing fourth behind Pekka Rinne last year. His 28 wins are one shy of the league lead and, apart from a groin injury that sidelined him for a spell, he is rested only in back-toback situations.
“He doesn’t get enough credit for what he does, night in and night out,” claimed Auston Matthews, although the allegation is difficult to support. “He’s kept us in games that we didn’t deserve to win. (Saturday) he came up with some big saves, for the offence to get rolling … it all started with a couple of big saves from him.”
It was a stirring rally by the Leafs over the Habs, once they had regrouped during the first intermission. The kind of confidence-boosting performance that had been lacking of late, testament to coach Mike Babcock’s perpetual instructions to outwork the opposition.
“Forty minutes is a long time,” Andersen had observed of the faith he placed in his club’s offence, though it should be noted that the 6-3 result was misleading; the score was knotted 3-3 with fewer than two minutes left in regulation, and two of the three goals Toronto posted from in a furious finale were into an empty net.
“We just reset, made sure we came out, put our best foot forward, didn’t really think about what happened in the first period,” Andersen said.
No Leaf has toiled more sturdily than Andersen, with his 44 starts, in a league that has gone goal-crazy, teams combining to score more than six goals a game for the first time in more than a decade. A team has tallied more than seven goals in a game 42 times this year. And — it’s a broken record — Andersen
sees more rubber come his way than most of his brethren: 2,211 shots in 2017-18, fourth on the ledger so far in 2018-19, at 1,455.
“Mental toughness” was how Andersen described his team’s nervy response to a severe deficit against a club of mutual loathing.
That mental stamina is a key quotient for the 29-year-old Andersen. He had to lock it down after that maelstrom of an opening 20. “That first period, once it’s played, it’s done, you can’t do anything about it. Growing older, you realize that a bit more, that you’re got to reset and I have to stop the next one. We have confidence in each other and we can score more than three goals. If you tried to limit their chances, we’d be able to climb our way back.”
Andersen is a long, cool glass of water. But he was sufficiently aggravated at one point Saturday that he drew a trip- ping penalty on Andrew Shaw — a primo crease invader — late in the first, although that appeared more a reactive twinge than felonious intent.
The zebras called one goaltender interference penalty against the Habs, with Artturi Lehkonen fingered and Tyler Ennis converting on the power play to bring Toronto within one.
“I can’t control what they call,” Andersen shrugged. “I’m just trying to not let it bother me and keep my focus on trying to stop the puck. Sometimes you get more frustrated by it, but you’ve just to try to keep your composure.”
Sure and fine. But barbarians at the gate have been taking way too many liberties with Andersen, with no pushback. Recall a collision in Montreal a fortnight ago — Andersen down, unmoving for a few anxious moments, which he insists was not a playing dead pantomime to coax an interference call — and Jacob de la Rose going all gladiator against him in Detroit at the start of the month.
Goaltender interference remains a nebulous, highly subjective violation. It flared up controversially all last year, especially down the stretch. For years, goalie interference was a call that could only be made by the referee on the ice and was too frequently missed, even when the netman got clearly steamrolled. In 2015-16, the league added replay review for goaltender interference; coaches could ask for a review, at the cost of a timeout if the play was upheld.
Indeed, officials started overturning calls fairly often, many of those reversals on plays that were far from obvious, nitpicky. Commission Gary Bettman acknowledged officials were “overthinking” calls. Finally, last March, the league changed the process for reviews so that the final call would be made by an off-ice official — the eye in the control-room sky — in a bid for more applied consistency.
So how’s that working out? Just about everybody hates the rule.
But, again, Andersen’s dilemma would be hugely reduced if Leaf skaters were more mindful of clearing the clot in the crease. How come not?
“I don’t know how to answer that honestly,” Matthews admitted. “Typically it’s s a penalty but obviously you don’t want to shove guys into him. But he’s a big boy. We want to do everything we can to protect him, keep guys out of the crease and give him the best opportunity to see the puck, every time, every shot.”
The inclination, Matthews said, is to let officials deal with encroachment.
“We’ll just get a power play from it.”
Lah-dee-dah. Easy for him to say.