PWHL TORONTO HAS SPECIAL REASON FOR ITS SUCCESS
EXCELLENT POWER PLAY AND PENALTY KILL HAS PROPELLED TEAM TO FIRST PLACE IN THE LEAGUE
With just under a week to go before the playoff run they hope will end in the hoisting of the Walter Cup, PWHL Toronto looks to be in about as good shape as they could hope.
First place overall, which brings with it home ice throughout the playoffs and the opportunity to pick its first-round opponent: check.
That was secured Wednesday night with a convincing 4-1 victory over a Minnesota team desperate to clinch a berth in the upcoming playoffs.
Minnesota captain Kendall Coyne-schofield latched on to a major difference in the two teams at this point in the season and that was the state of their special teams.
In the win, Toronto went 2-for-3 on its power play while killing off all three minor penalties, two of which overlapped and gave Minnesota a two-player advantage for 42 seconds to begin the second period.
The penalty kill, or power kill as the Toronto players refer to it, has been a strength all year. The team has been short-handed a total of 71 times this year and allowed just six goals in those situations. Oh, and they’ve scored three “jailbreak” goals short-handed, too.
The power play, which has hovered around an 11 per cent success rate most of the year, has gone a combined 3-for-7 in the past two games to raise that number to just under 15 per cent.
With both units firing on all cylinders at this point, Toronto is a scary opponent to face and Coyne-schofield knows it.
“Special teams is a key component of winning a championship and it doesn’t matter if that’s here (in the PHWL), international competition, NHL — whatever you are watching, special teams wins and loses you games,” she said.
It was only a couple of games ago that Toronto was talking about its own power play in the same perplexed way Coyne-schofield was discussing Minnesota’s, but that talk has quieted now with Toronto picking up three power-play goals in seven tries the past two games.
Part of that is some new blood on the power-play unit with Emma Maltais, already a focal point of the team’s penalty-kill unit, bringing her flat and pinpoint passing to the power play.
But it’s also a change in approach.
“We talked about a mentality shift and just treating it not like it’s a power play but like it’s normal 5-on-5 hockey and having that attack mentality on it,” Maltais said. “I think that has been the difference the past few games. We have really shifted our focus into not just scoring goals but creating momentum.
“Our passes are nice and crisp. It scares the (penalty killers). As a penalty killer myself, I know what it’s like when the power-play passes are flat and players are showing confidence.”
Toronto coach Troy Ryan suggested the success of the team’s penalty kill has helped create the recent success of the power play.
“Our penalty kill, and this will probably surprise people, we don’t work on it,” Ryan said. “We don’t practise it. We talk about it a lot because we believe it is a mentality.
“We will do little tweaks, but we show the penalty kill what the power play may be doing and we just trust them to use their instincts. It’s all about the little details in a penalty kill.
“We have kind of challenged the power play to find their own mentality. If you go out on a power play and think it’s time to get a break and you get outworked by four people, then you don’t have the advantage. That sounds like old coach speak, but it’s true. You need to have confidence in something that is going to fail 80 per cent of the time. So if you don’t use that as a momentum builder, you are never going to have success.”
Right now, the power-play unit looks confident. From the hard, flat passes Maltais referenced to the defenders seeing those net front bodies of Natalie Spooner and Sarah Nurse and directing pucks their way for tip-ins.
But never has it looked as confident as it did on Wednesday’s first power-play goal with the unit working the puck around smartly until Nurse had established position below the goal line, just off the left post. From there, the puck was fed back to her and with the penalty killers all focused on that side of the ice, Nurse fed a crisp, on-target pass to Hannah Miller, who had dived in from the opposite point for the one-timer and game-tying goal.
If PWHL Toronto can have its power play playing with the same kind of confidence the penalty kill has shown all season, it’s going to take some kind of performance to keep them away from that trophy presentation about three weeks from now.