Sloppy opener has Leafs told to tighten up
Babcock looking for sharper effort against Senators
Mike Babcock tacked on some X’s and O’s for the Toronto Maple Leafs on Friday, but they were nothing to do with a love letter.
The coach got the result he wanted in the season opener, a W against the Montreal Canadiens, but he was not enamoured with how they got there. A disjointed effort moving the puck through centre and keeping it deep, especially 5-on-5, blunted the Leaf attack, kept its trio of centres frustrated much of the night and in Babcock’s opinion, it all reflected unfairly on his defence.
So after a day off — and a fortuitous bit of scheduling that allowed him to watch his two next foes play each other Thursday night — Babcock was ready to unleash some tough love at practice before playing the Ottawa Senators here Saturday and Chicago on the road Sunday. The Leafs spent lots of time in video verité before they went on ice and received additional whiteboard reinforcement from Babcock and his staff.
“(Contrary to) what I hear, our defence is just fine,” Babcock said. “But if you don’t play in the offensive zone, if you don’t put any pressure on the other team’s defence, your D never looks any good. That’s a five-man unit that has to make that happen and it didn’t.”
The overtime victory came down to two elements Babcock had insisted he doesn’t want to rely on so much this year, Frederik Andersen’s goaltending and individual stars such as Auston Matthews needing 11th hour individual heroics.
“We didn’t really do too good of a job of (pressuring) as a line and as a team, we didn’t have enough time in their zone,” said Matthews, who had the 3-2 winner. “We can focus on working harder (Saturday), but at the same time, working smarter is probably a better-case scenario. They kind of know what’s coming at them every time and we just need to be a little bit more deceptive, not throwing the puck away in their zone, just hanging on to it, making the right play. If it’s not there, just start over.”
The Sens gave the Blackhawks a good fight before losing in overtime on Thursday and Chicago, which isn’t quite its usual Cup contender calibre according to pundits, can’t be taken lightly by the Leafs after being given a wake-up call by Montreal.
“Every night, you get a challenge, teams are coming in here to win,” warned Babcock. “We got to see both (on TV), but we’ll just worry about Ottawa now.
“Everybody at this time of the year is really confident in their teams and feeling good about themselves. So we have to get better through confidence.”
On the draws, the Leafs’ big three centres — Matthews, John Tavares and Nazem Kadri — had great numbers Wednesday, but Babcock groused that 19 of the 5-on-5 faceoffs took place in the Leafs zone compared to 10 at the other end. Asked if that was a case of poor pressure or traced back to ineffective breakouts, the coach quipped “what comes first, the chicken or the egg?”
Just don’t cluck about the defence, a sensitive topic with Babcock as the court of public opinion says any Stanley Cup aspirations depend on eventually bringing in help from outside.
“If you looked at our top four, with the exception of (Nikita) Zaitsev, the other night wasn’t one of their (top games),” Babcock conceded. “But we were all in it together. Just keep on getting better and being solid. Morgan (Rielly) wants to be good offensively, we want him to be a good shutdown guy. And that goes for Jake Gardiner. We’ve challenged them all to be better in certain areas and I think we’ve been working at that pretty good.”