With scouts circling like sharks, Leafs finally win one,
‘Fun’ OT victory rare sight at ACC, long droughts end
All Points Bulletin.
Be on the lookout for the following individuals: Phil Kessel and Tyler Bozak.
Last seen wearing blue trunks, white jerseys and bewildered expressions. Armed with hockey sticks but not considered dangerous. If found, please return to the Toronto Maple Leafs. Also missing: The power play. All right, all right. I won’t be snide ’n’ sarcastic about it, not in the wake of Toronto’s first win after five L’s in a row.
Recovered on a Saturday night at the Air Canada Centre: James van Riemsdyk, Nazem Kadri and Leo Komarov.
They’d been absent from the scoresheet for a long time. For Komarov, it had been a16-game drought; for Kadri, no joy in seven games; for van Riemsdyk 11 games.
Each reacquainted themselves with that old red-light district feeling in a rugged, closely contested affair with the Jets. Riemsdyk nailed the 4-3 winner, a beauty one-timer two feet off the ice, off a saucer pass from new Leaf Olli Jokinen at 3:47 of OT, when it looked like a shootout was looming.
“Morgan (Rielly) did a really nice job seeing me and Olli breaking out,” Riemsdyk said afterwards, spreading the props. “He got the puck up to Olli. I was high. Olli got me the puck and I’m glad it went in.’’ Ecstatic, for a nice change. Smiles in the dressing room, no body slinking away. What’s that word? Oh yeah, fun. “A fun game to play, both teams were playing really hard,” said Joffrey Lupul, who had a strong performance, reinserted into the lineup after missing four games with a knee injury.
Emotional and intense, qualities lacking around the Leafs nigh on New Year’s Eve, when they beat the Bruins in Boston.
Thirty-nine hits for the Leafs, 37 for the Jets. “The crowd was into it, Jets fans, Leafs fan,” Lupul continued. “It was an entertaining game.”
Jonathan Bernier, back on form, was particularly sharp in the frantic final minutes of the third, 29 saves on the evening. “We set the tone. We hit a lot. We got everyone in the game.”
On the prowl at the ACC a couple of hours earlier, looking on, were 15 scouts. They might even have seen a few Leaf bits that impressed in what was arguably the best effort Toronto has put out in ages, certainly the most muscular.
With every passing game, it had seemed, the trade market value of just about every active Leaf further dwindled.
Not that this match was lacking in smack-your-head exasperation.
Just a minute here, guys. No, really. Literally. Just a damn minute guys. As in: The last tick-tock of a period, 60 seconds or under on the clock, and the Leafs apparently at their most vulnerable, to say nothing of sloppy and moronic.
Twice the home side fell in arrears to the visitors when the Platinum Seat Set was already streaming towards the intermission bar. Meanwhile, the Leafs were choking on turnover croquettes.
This defect is not an anomaly. We’ve seen these Leafs turn the other cheek often enough in the late strokes of a period. And, of course, in the early going of a period. And, um, in between.
In the hulking and huffy Jets — fighting for a Western Conference playoff wild-card spot — the Leafs encountered an ornery opponent, the least disciplined, as in most penalized, team in the league. Surprisingly, given the Jets were nicely rested up after an off-day in town while the Leafs were securing a 31st loss in Raleigh, Toronto matched Winnipeg for energy and jump through a mutually hostile game where every whistle seemed to segue into a pushing and snarling scrum. Goodness, Kessel even stripped the puck off Adam Pardy late in the third — after hitting him into the boards.
Quite eye-popping, too, was the backswing-from-the-heels slapshot that Komarov unleashed from just above the left circle, beating sophomore NHL netminder Michael Hutchinson top corner to give Toronto a 1-0 lead. Komarov’s teammate Korbinian Holzer was in the penalty box at the time for wiping out Hutchinson just to the side of his cage, far out of his crease and fair game but brazen goalie interference nonetheless and Holzer drove his skates right into Hutchinson’s pads.
Toronto’s seventh short-handed goal of the season, and sixth on the register for Komarov this year, was worthy of a double fist-pump because it broke that 16-game drought for Uncle Leo.
An eventful penalty both ways as the Jets came right back a mere 34 seconds later with a power-play conversion on an inadvertent owngoal by Rielly. The emerging blue line stud had apologized the day before for an innocuous off-hand remark about manning up to the Leafs’ woes — “You are not here to be a girl about it’’ — which got him crucified on social media by gender vigilantes with their pinheads up their arses. Rather, Rielly should have apologized for having his stick in the paint when the puck popped out in front of the Leaf and deflecting it past Jonathan Bernier, who couldn’t slide over quick enough to cover the left post. Goal credited to Jacob Trouba.
It was Bozak — oh, hello, there you are — in the box for an utterly pointless tripping infraction when Mark Scheifele nudged the Jets ahead 2-1, just 50 seconds left in the opening frame. On that occasion, the horrific misplay was down to Petter Granberg. The recent Marlies call-up tossed the puck out carelessly from behind the Leaf net, presumably an attempted pass for Rielly, who wasn’t remotely expecting it with Jets lurking all around. Grateful recipient, instead, Scheifele: backhand-forehand, up-and-over.
Second period closing out, 54.5 seconds left, and it was Jake Gardiner whose casual attempt to clear the puck out of his zone never made it past the blue line with Michael Frolik the goal-scoring beneficiary, this after Daniel Winnik had tied it at 2s.
But Kadri, who hasn’t been quite as invisible these past several weeks as his numbers would suggest, put Toronto back into the knotted picture with his second stab at the puck from the crease at 3:57 of the third. That set up a dandy finish to the affair, especially in overtime, which the Leafs started with a man advantage for one minute and 55 seconds. But the alleged Big Line tried to pass the puck into the net, to no avail. What big line, you might well ask.
Oddly, one Leaf who didn’t even make it to the start was young Brandon Kozun, an early-season glimmer on the Leaf horizon who’d scored his first NHL goal 24 hours earlier in a 2-1 loss in Raleigh. Coach Peter Horachek had said, following the optional morning skate: “My biggest weapon is ice time. How much you get and when you get it and who’s playing hardest.”
So then he scratches Kozun. (Scratch heads here.)
The Leafs are now 3-15-2 since Randy Carlyle got his ticket punched. The last game Carlyle coached for Toronto was a 5-1 loss against these very Jets, in Winnipeg on Jan. 3, when the Leafs were already tumbling but at least still watchable, mostly. “I didn’t play that night,” a good-mood Lupul said Saturday night post-game. “Not my fault.”
Here, in the city that sleeps only fitfully and where few players are willing to come — top five in the no-go zones, given their druthers, according to an ESPN poll this past week of player agents — dejection has tilted towards maniacal, straitjacket laughter, and Tank Nation cheering for Connor McDavid lottery balls. “Of course all the media talk and some of the fan attention is they want the team to lose,” Lupul had observed earlier. “But no players want the team to lose. Still, obviously the game doesn’t have the same meaning it would if you’re chasing a playoff spot.”
This one, for whatever reason — I like to think it was at least partly atonement for what the Leafs had wrought for their former catch when last these clubs met — felt like it has a purpose. For one fleeting night, what was missing was the existential nothingness of a meaningless campaign.
As good as it gets, alas, from here to the finish.