Horachek won’t turn Leafs loose
Toronto’s interim coach insists on his struggling team playing more responsibly on defence
Among the many people who knew that the Toronto Maple Leafs played a flawed brand of hockey was Randy Carlyle.
The team’s fortunate luck, the nowdeposed head coach said, “is going to turn against us if we continue to play to the level that we’re playing.”
That quote was from October. October of 2013. One of the strange postscripts to Carlyle’s time in Toronto is that, although he spent the better part of two years insisting that he wanted his charges to play a more defensively sound game, he appeared to have no idea how to make that happen — even though one of his new assistants this season, Peter Horachek, has managed to pull it off more or less instantly.
The first seven games under Horachek, who was made interim head coach when Carlyle was dismissed on Jan. 6, have for Toronto fans been like the middle third of a Michael Bay movie: the heroes are vanquished, searching for answers, picking up dead bodies amid the rubble. Some of those Leafs games have included responsible, disciplined play, some were duds by any measure, but suddenly shaky goaltending and a stretch of bad luck for the team’s shooters have combined for a 1-6 record under Horachek and pushed the Leafs from the fringes of the playoff race to barely able to sniff it. Because this is Toronto and a simple losing streak is not enough, there is now the added controversial element of swift justice being levied against the three dim bulbs who saw fit to toss Leafs jerseys onto the ice in a 4-1 loss to Carolina on Monday. (The punishment includes a oneyear ban from any event at the Air Canada Centre. If you do it again, you get a two-year ban. Sorry, I’ll show myself out now.)
Horachek deserves credit for showing some resolve amid the wreckage and the bomb craters. Fresh off the ugly result against Carolina, which capped a five-game stretch in which his team scored two goals, the coach was asked if he would consider letting his players revert to their former wide-open style.
Horachek, who really does have the bearing of a first-rate homicide cop, was blunt in response: “No.”
“I don’t think any of the good teams in the league play that way,” he said.
No, they do not. Chicago, Tampa Bay, Detroit, the New York Islanders: all are among the league leaders in terms of controlling the play as measured by shot differential. And, the 16 teams that would qualify for the playoffs if they began tomorrow closely align with the top 16 puck-possession teams, with a few exceptions.
But the problem with Toronto’s mid-season lab experiment to test the merits of possession-oriented hockey is that Horachek has not been handed a particularly great set of mice. It’s still a team that has a third-line centre playing on its top line, an awkward mix of defencemen, and David Clarkson sucking up $5 million US a year in cap space.
The Leafs want to be a four-line team, but against Carolina they had Matt Frattin playing just three minutes and Sam Carrick contributing all of 2:17. It is a troubling sign, and not a good reflection on general manager Dave Nonis, when the Hurricanes, who came into the game tied with the league’s third-lowest point total, display far more forward depth. Carolina had only one player with fewer than 12 minutes of ice time against the Leafs. (Brad Malone, and he scored.) These are the Toronto Regressions, who on Dec. 19 had a goal differential on the season of +22. Sixteen games later, they are at -7.
Toronto’s new style of play should make them a better team over the long run, provided Horachek can keep the Leafs committed to it: He’s already talking about how some of them are “cheating” the system to try to score a quick goal and are instead giving up chances the other way. This is why it would have made sense to install a new system in, say, the offseason, when instead Toronto gave a contract extension to Carlyle.
But the style alone won’t solve things. At some point, the roster will also need to be addressed. As will be, one imagines, the person who assembled it in the first place.