Scoring goals is a good start
The Maple Leafs scored some goals Saturday night, and things worked out. In hockey and life, sometimes you’re lucky, and sometimes you’re good, and as long as you don’t rely on the former and try for the latter, it all amounts to the same thing in the end.
But on Saturday night, in their eighth game under new head coach Sheldon Keefe, the Leafs finally had a game they could feel good about, really good. When general manager Kyle Dubas fired head coach Mike Babcock nearly three weeks ago, he struggled to point to a signature win that looked like what he expected from this talent-heavy team, but the loss to the Cup champion Blues Oct. 7 was the closest thing. Toronto controlled scoring chances, and puck possession. They just didn’t win.
They jumped out to a 5-2 lead Saturday because, well, things worked. There were two power-play goals for the 10th-ranked unit in the league per efficiency, but which was middle of the pack in actual goals. A puck that pinballed to the right place, to Auston Matthews; a long shot from Jason Spezza that found the exact right path. There was a short-handed goal for a penalty kill that still ranks 25th.
“Well, we were able to score goals,” Keefe said after the win in St. Louis.
It’s a simple game, sometimes. This team was assembled by Dubas to be a collection of weapons: He spent money on superstar forwards, pushed for speed over physicality, and Keefe — in sidelining snowshoeing centre Frédérik
Gauthier for Pierre Engvall with Spezza back as the fourth-line centre, among other things — is pushing further down that path.
As all the changes are still being processed, the idea that they are being rewarded remains a powerful part of any hope to do something special this season.
“We had a nice cushion, obviously we made the best of our chances early, and we got to play with confidence a little bit better,” Leafs goaltender Frederik Andersen said of Toronto’s four firstperiod goals.
“I think we have confidence,” winger Zach Hyman said of the team’s penalty kill, during which he scored one of his two goals. “I don’t think we were overly terrible before, but I think once you string a couple kills together you start to build confidence, and then you start to roll.”
“Yeah, it’s a huge relief,” said centre Matthews, who scored twice after going without a goal in a modest five-game
slump. “It kind of gets you going a little bit, gets your confidence back,” Matthews said.
Confidence is a funny thing in hockey. It is a game where you control what you can control, but so often this season this team seemed joyless, without the requisite heart. Sometimes, they didn’t seem to be completely committed to what they were asked to do.
And the result was a team that, even after the Blues game, is 21st in 5-on-5 shooting percentage, at 7.66 per cent, per the website Natural Stat Trick. Shooting percentage can vary on teams from year to year, but in the Matthews-Mitch Marner-William Nylander era, the Leafs had been exceedingly consistent. In the past three years they have ranked, going backward, third, third, and second.
They can score. It’s what they’re built to do. They are still ninth in the NHL in goals per game, at 3.19. Last year, they were third, at 3.45. Keefe keeps talking about how they haven’t worked to the middle of the ice enough this season; as he put it to reporters on Saturday morning, “I think we’ve found in our game that we’ve lived in the perimeter a little bit too much, and been satisfied with that.”
That does at least partly explain how they can be seventh in puck possession with the effect of the score factored in (right behind the steamrolling Boston Bruins) and 14th in expected goals (six behind the steamrolling Boston Bruins) as measured by where those shots are coming from. Which would at least partly explain why their confidence was low, and needed repair.
So if Keefe can help get them to those areas, with schemes and philosophy and by inspiring organized belief — and if they can get there themselves — it will be a huge part of how this team can recover. Toronto controlled 58 per cent of the puck possession against St. Louis, and 53 per cent of the expected goals. It’s a good start.
“I thought we had really good moments in the game and got rewarded on some of our chances,” Andersen told reporters Saturday night. “I mean, it’s easier to play with a lead, obviously. You’re not chasing anything. You’re trying to keep it simple, obviously keep pushing, but you don’t have to force anything down the middle and play more risky hockey. I think it’s good for us, it’s better to have the lead than not so I think, it’s more confidence, more controllable hockey when you have the lead.”
To be a great offensive team requires creating great chances, obviously, but it also requires the confidence to make those plays, and to expand the range of plays you’re willing to try. The Leafs have fumbled plenty so far this year, but if nothing else, they should be able to score with any team in the league. And if they can’t do that, nothing much else might matter.