Bargain basement Woll giving Leafs playoff hope
One of team’s best investments in recent years
At $766,667 a season, Joseph Woll has become the rarest of all Maple Leafs. He’s a bargain on a roster best known for high-priced talent.
He’s an underpriced gem who pushed the Maple Leafs through to Game 6 at home, and now onto Game 7 in Boston on Saturday night.
And who knows what after that?
At somewhere between $4-5 million in revenue for every home date they play in the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Leafs are one win away from advancing against the struggling Bruins, which would give them at least two more home dates. That would make Woll just about the greatest Leaf investment in many a year.
This has happened before in Toronto, just not by anyone this young or this inexperienced. Ed Belfour won playoff games here by himself and that was before he was elected to the Hall of Fame. Curtis Joseph stole games and that was before he should have been elected to the Hall of Fame.
Joseph Woll is 25 years old and 39 games into his National Hockey League career, which has been delayed at times because he hasn’t been able to stay healthy enough.
But playoff time invents new hockey heroes almost every spring. Patrick Roy won a Stanley Cup as a rookie in Montreal the last time a Canadian team took home the championship honours. Out of nowhere come brilliant playoff goaltenders on occasion. Adin Hill won a Stanley Cup last year.
No one is suggesting Woll is taking the Leafs to the promised land. But he is here, still standing, coming on in relief in the third period of Game 4 and then starting Games 5 and 6 on two nights when the Maple Leafs season could have ended but didn’t.
The scorebook on Woll through his seven periods and two-plus minutes of overtime read this way: Two starts, two wins, a goalsagainst average of 0.86, a save percentage of .964, and a should-have-been shutout performance in Game 6, a 2-1 victory over Boston, where Woll had put up a clean sheet until the final click on the clock.
It was a gigantic victory for the Maple Leafs playing without their largest and most expensive superstar.
And it explained playoff hockey, the many twists, the kids who come from nowhere, the stunning disappointments, all in 60 somewhat unexplainable minutes between the Leafs and the Bruins.
Here’s the thing about playoffs. You hope and expect your stars to be the best players on the ice, the way William Nylander was for the winning Leafs and the way Nylander’s great friend, David Pastrnak, wasn’t for the Bruins. Sometimes it works out that way, sometimes it doesn’t.
But when the kids come through — the way Woll did in the Toronto net, the way winger Matthew Knies came through in overtime of Game 5 against the Bruins, it demonstrates the side of the Leafs roster we don’t often pay enough attention to.
Somehow after six games, the Leafs defence, which isn’t good enough on paper to beat anybody, played tight enough to limit Boston to two goals in the past two games.
Somehow after six games, with Nylander out the first three, with Auston Matthews out the past two and a period, the Leafs have gotten just enough offence to squeak out wins.
Somehow after six games, Max Domi moves in for Matthews and does the job, while Knies makes so many small plays on a line with John Tavares and Nylander that he turns out to have a gigantic impact in two victories.
Somehow, this team that is so top heavy, was led to must-wins by a goalie making less than $800,000 and a winger whose salary cashes out at $925,000 when its collective backs have been to the wall.
Thursday night was a victory of determination. Players trying to find another level, a new level — a team not known for defensive excellence playing excellent defence.
And of course, there were the two Game 6 goals by Nylander, Toronto’s only scores. That’s the Nylander who gets a $4 million raise in September and who will earn more than 10 times Woll’s salary next season.
Woll has been as close to perfect as you can get in his games — and they haven’t been easy games to play. He barely faced any shots in the first period of Game 5. He faced just one shot in the first period of Game 6.
Most goalies will tell you they hate those kind of games, with so few shots, without touching pucks and feeling their way into the play, until it eventually becomes busy.
But that didn’t matter the last two games. Woll never looked anything other than sharp.
And for the first time in many playoff moons, the Leafs seem to have a goaltender who can play with whomever he is up against.