Maple Leafs must stop Pastrnak to survive
BRUINS’ LEADING SCORER IS HEART AND SOUL OF THEIR OFFENCE
The way to beat the Boston Bruins is rather simple and rather impossible, all at the same time.
You have to find a way to control David Pastrnak.
He is, in many ways, the Bruins’ centrepiece, though he doesn’t play centre. Leaf killers of the past Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci have retired, leaving Pastrnak as Boston’s surest thing.
Pastrnak led the Bruins this season with 110 points — 43 more than any other player, which in this case means 43 points more than Brad Marchand. Last year, he was 46 points ahead of Marchand.
Everybody else in Boston lines up after them offensively.
If the Leafs can’t find a way to deal with Pastrnak, they have little chance of winning a series between two very differently built and stylistically different teams, though they do have similar records.
Boston won all four games against Toronto this season, which is somewhat suspect now because two of those games went to overtime. One was decided by shootout. None of that factors come playoff time.
Pastrnak had seven points in four games against the Maple Leafs, two of those being three-point games. The Leafs had seven goals in total against the Bruins.
And therein lies the first of many problems for Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe. What do you do to stop or slow Pastrnak? And how, with the series starting on the road, do you get the matchups you want and need in the first two games?
Some coaches (Pat Burns being one of them) liked to match best line against best line. And if he liked his first line, he was happy to put Doug Gilmour out against Jeremy Roenick or Wayne Gretzky or Steve Yzerman in the playoffs. Some coaches shadow forwards with other forwards. Some coaches have shutdown pairs of defence specifically assigned to match the opposition. The Leafs, unfortunately, do not have such a tandem on their blue line.
They will need more of a team concept to attack Pastrnak and attempt to limit his excellence.
How much does Pastrnak mean to the Bruins? When he doesn’t get any points in a game, and that happened 22 times this season, the Bruins won five of those. When Pastrnak gets only one point in a game, the Bruins lost just five of 18 in regulation.
But the big number comes when Pastrnak gets two points or more in a game, which he did 37 times this season, Boston has a ridiculous record of 30 wins and only three losses in regulation.
Since Jan. 1, though, which represents more than half the regular season, the Maple Leafs and Bruins have basically the same record.
Since March 1, both teams have won 12 games, the Leafs with one more point than the Bruins in that time.
Pastrnak scored three more points than goal-scoring machine Auston Matthews managed through the season. The two giants were all but even playing five-onfive hockey. Pastrnak was a touch more efficient on the power play than Matthews, which has always been a bit of a mystery for the Leafs.
Why Matthews isn’t this great power-play scorer is more on coaching and structure than on him.
The Leafs could have knocked Boston out in Game 6 in Toronto on a Sunday afternoon in their playoff series in 2019. They had no jump that day. They lost the final two games of the series without much of an answer of system or execution.
They lost the year before that to the Bruins after winning Games 5 and 6 to tie the series. Game 7 was tied heading into the third period in 2018. The Leafs were dominated in the final period, with Bergeron and Krejci each contributing three points, and two from Pastrnak and Marchand in the final period.
Matthews, William Nylander and Mitch Marner, it being playoffs, combined to score no goals that night. Which is why, even now, controlling Pastrnak as best you can means so much to the possible success of the Leafs.
Last year in the playoffs, when the checking got tighter and the goaltending got better, the Leafs scored only 10 goals in five games and were handily eliminated by the Florida Panthers. Matthews had no goals in the series. Had he scored once or twice in the series, with the games as close as they were, he could have moved the Toronto needle.
Pastrnak is involved with 41 per cent of the Boston offence. Matthews scored 22.7 per cent of the Toronto goals and was involved with 35 per cent of the Leafs’ offence this season.
For his career, which is on the upswing, Pastrnak has scored 1.07 points per game, that coming after scoring 1.34 points per game this season. In playoffs, his numbers drop just slightly, to 1.02 from 1.07.
The Bruins are too strong in goal and too sharp on defence for Toronto to try to match Boston mistake for mistake and goal for goal. The Leafs need to play a smarter game than that, beginning with a strategy in place to try to limit Pastrnak’s effectiveness.