BOO BIRDS BACK
Leafs blow early lead in 7-4 loss to Flyers.
We hadn’t heard the familiar sound in some time. But there it was, rumbling down from the upper bowl of the Air Canada Centre as the Maple Leafs exited the ice surface for Saturday night’s second intermission.
Yes, those were boos — a brief murmur of a chorus of them. And if the show of displeasure would have had Ron Wilson tsk-tsking from his high horse, the expression of discontent, coming as it did in the midst of a 7-4 loss to the Fly- ers, was wholly understandable.
Two games removed from a six-game win streak, the Maple Leafs put forth the latest piece of evidence that they’d grown fat and happy during their recent run of prosperity. Two games removed from a 27-day run that saw the Leafs reel off a 10-1-1 record despite repeated warnings from coach Randy Carlyle that they weren’t “playing the right way,” the percentages have enjoyed a sudden reckoning.
“That,” said defenceman Stephane Robidas, “was not the right way.”
To paraphrase centreman Peter Holland: It wasn’t a 9-2 loss to Nashville. But Toronto’s crumbling at the hands of a team that came into town in 14th place in the East wasn’t much prettier.
“We thought it was going to come easy to us again,” said Holland.
Whatever became of last month’s oft-uttered team objective to limit the opposition to 25 shots a game?
Outshot 42-25 on Saturday, the Leafs have managed to hold the other guys under 30 once in the past seven games.
Whatever happened to the idea that they’d be better off grinding in the opposing zone rather than gambling on home-run passes? After taking an early 2-0 lead, the Leafs took most of the rest of the night off, generating next to zero offensive-zone possession on yet another outing.
In other words, maybe it wasn’t a great night to run a big-screen television commercial for the fancy wristwatch manufacturer Dion Phaneuf now endorses. Ill-timed tagline: “Better starts now.”
Worse could come soon enough. Toronto visits Chicago Sunday night for the first of seven straight games on the road.
“The overall execution of the simplest things was a challenge after the 10minute mark,” said a subdued Carlyle after it was over.
It wasn’t all bad — not all night.
The Leafs were coming off a subpar effort in Carolina on Thursday that inspired, along with a juggling of the team’s top two lines, the banishment to the pressbox of defenceman Jake Gardiner. Thursday’s 4-1 loss also got Carlyle talking about the need for more energetic starts; the Leafs, after all, came into Saturday night’s game with a 14-0-0 record when they score first.
“We haven’t had very good starts in the last couple of games,” Carlyle said.
They corrected that trend on Saturday, scoring two goals — by Joffrey Lupul and James van Riemsdyk — on their first four shots on goal. Alas, less than a few minutes later, captain Phaneuf didn’t react quickly enough to flatten R.J. Umberger, who put in a rebound to make it 2-1 midway through the first period. The Leafs allowed Sean Couturier to roam freely in the slot on a goal that made it 2-2.
Cue the goal-trading. David Clarkson restored Toronto’s advantage just 14 seconds later. The Flyers responded nine seconds after that. Less than 12 minutes and a combined 18 shots into the contest, six goals had gone into the nets — the last three separated by a matter of 26 seconds. Jonathan Bernier’s first-period save percentage was a beastly .666.
To that end, Saturday’s was a game in which the Leafs couldn’t rely on anything they normally lean on. Bernier stealing the show? His outing got worse early in the second period when he allowed a Nicklas Grossmann bank shot off the back boards to go in off his right leg — a fluke that gave the Flyers a 4-3 lead. Cruelly, Bernier, the undisputed star of Toronto’s recent hot streak, wouldn’t be chased in favour of James Reimer until midway through the third period, after the Flyers made it 7-3.
And what about Toronto’s usually strong second period? Heading into Saturday, no NHL team had scored more than Toronto’s 43 goals in the middle 20 minutes. Against the Flyers the Leafs managed all of three shots on goal in the opening 10 minutes of that frame. They had four shots in the closing 10 minutes, and zero goals all told.
That’s presumably part of the reason the home-rink boos rained for the first time in a long while. That and the fact the Leafs were down 5-3 heading into the third period after Claude Giroux scored his second goal of the game a few minutes before the second break.
For all the pre-game chatter about the need for the Leafs to find a credible replacement for Gardiner, Gardiner’s stand-in was nobody’s first star. Philly’s Pierre-Edouard Bellemare made fill-in Korbinian Holzer look awfully slow on a first-period blow-by that resulted in a scoring chance. When Giroux snapped home the goal that made it 5-3, the German defenceman was inexplicably caught on his knees near the Toronto crease, out of the play by virtue of his immobility.
But, as Carlyle said after it was over, the effort was so universally poor that singling out one or two culprits seemed inappropriate.
“They played, for the last 50 minutes, a lot harder than we did,” said Phaneuf.
In other words, Toronto’s last home game of 2014 looked like a lot of the rest. It was a misadventure in chance-trading, a clinic in defensive ineptitude, a demonstration of unwillingness to play the northsouth style Carlyle keeps demanding. It was worthy of the boos.