Game 4 is crunch time for Leafs
TORONTO — The clocks were six minutes off in the Toronto Maple Leafs’ dressing room on Tuesday; some players were late to the ice as a result. A little thing, no big deal, a detail; it got fixed. It was easy to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.
As for the series, Wednesday is the day it can get late — fast. Three games in, nothing has really been decided. But Game 4 will go a long way toward determining whether this will be a series for the Leafs or a cameo. Go down 3-1 in the NHL and your chances of coming back are about 9.1 per cent; if you’re playing Game 5 on the road, that number is 7.8 per cent. A 3-1 series deficit would be very difficult to fix.
“Again, experience: How do you get it? You have to live it,” said Leafs coach Randy Carlyle on Tuesday, a day after Toronto’s 5-2 loss in Game 3 at home. “What you’d like to do, and that’s what we’re trying to do, is you focus on one thing that you can control. And we can control our commitment to playing to the level that is required. Ordinary’s not good enough … we’re going to need more than ordinary.”
After nine years away, this series is found money for Toronto. Game 1, with its fall-through-the-ice performance, was a bit of a shock, but Game 2 was a rousing piece of hockey — Phil Kessel’s goal seemed to be the most cathartic part, based on the triumphal Twitter explosion it produced — and then Game 3, when the first chance to drive Yonge Street residents bonkers with honking came apart at the seams.
Up until now, though, it was the preamble — first game, tie series, home-ice advantage regained, the stuff that sets up the life-or-hockey-death stuff. It’s about to get serious. Or more serious. As Bruins winger Brad Marchand puts it, you find out a lot about a team and its players in Games 5, 6 and 7 of a series. In this case, Game 4, too.
“Little chances here and there create chances for goals,” veteran Bruins defenceman Dennis Seidenberg said. “(The pressure is) huge, huge. I mean, you look at the first round in (2011), Montreal could have scored a couple goals in overtime (of Game 7 in the first round). (Tim) Thomas made that glove save during the game. There’s so much that goes into every round. There’s also a lot of luck, but you work for your luck.”
There is emotion, too. In Game 2, the Bruins were piling on in the third period, having closed the gap to 3-2, and then James van Riemsdyk managed to stuff home a balletic goal to blunt the momentum. In Game 3, the Leafs pulled to within 2-1 in the second period, and the building was rocking. Fifty seconds later, Milan Lucic eluded Mark Fraser and found Nathan Horton on the goal that sucked the oxygen out of Toronto’s lungs. Little turning points, both of which became huge.
This hasn’t become a knife-edge series yet — no late tie games, no overtime — but the gap in the games after Toronto became acclimated to the altitude hasn’t been extreme, either way.
“I think it’s been a close series — never mind the score, but if you look at how the games have been played,” said Bruins coach Claude Julien. “There’s some nights that mistakes are costing goals on both sides — I said it after Game 2, the outnumbered situations that we gave up were what cost us the game. There were some breakdowns that the Leafs had that we took advantage of.”
“We aren’t that far off,” said Carlyle. So what now? Boston’s more talented, but the Leafs are not doomed, not yet. Tuesday featured some low-key gamesmanship, with Julien accusing the Leafs of “crying wolf” about Boston’s faceoff techniques, and Marchand saying Kessel wanted to fight him — you know, the stuff that bubbles up as a series goes along, as opposed to the all-out blood feud that erupted between Ottawa and Montreal.
But for this to continue, Game 4 will be the biggest Leafs game since the last one. All season, this team has outperformed its underlying statistics — the Leafs were an awful puck possession team, bordering on comically poor, and that has a huge correlation to winning — but they got here and they’ve won a game, and this is a chance to turn this from found money into something else.
Fraser was on the Toronto Marlies team that reached the American Hockey League final last season, and he said that as you move through the playoffs, as you endure the highs and the disappointments, it almost becomes a selfpropelled, self-fulfilling prophecy — like the way teams turn the tide after the kind of goals van Riemsdyk and Horton produced. The Leafs aren’t anywhere near that point yet. They may not get there. But Game 4 is the best chance to live that experience, even a little.
“If teams even make it that far, teams are riding a high — you’ve faced adversity throughout the playoffs and you’ve done something to work through it, overcome it,” said Fraser. “You’ve experienced success. Like last year with the Marlies — we experienced plenty of adversity but we kept overcoming it, and because of that we were a group that believed.” So here comes the most pressure these players have seen this season; the most emphasis on not making those mistakes that doomed them in Game 3; the most playoff-style game of the season, until the next one.