Scoring an ‘impossible’ dream
Leafs are held to one goal or less for seventh time
As they prepared for their 13th game of the season on Friday night, the Maple Leafs held a pair of dubious distinctions. They were both the NHL’s worst team (as measured by fewest points in the standings) and also one of its least talented (as measured by 26 goals scored, third fewest in the league).
Viewing the hockey world from its inglorious bottom had led some denizens of Leafland to make notable observations about the trouble with the modern game.
“It’s impossible to score,” Toronto coach Mike Babcock had said earlier in the week.
Tell that to the Montreal Canadiens, who had scored more than twice as many goals as the Leafs heading into Friday’s games, albeit in a few extra outings.
“You can’t score from the wing anymore,” Joffrey Lupul, Toronto’s leading goal scorer, was saying on Friday morning. “If you want to score goals, you’ve got to get to the net.”
Tell that to Henrik Zetterberg, who scored the opening goal of Friday night’s Leafs-Red Wings game at the Air Canada Centre on a 50-foot snapper that somehow found its way past a momentarily bumbling James Reimer with a few minutes left in the first period.
For a while it looked like that freak goal — which was “probably going a foot wide,” Reimer would later lament — might amount to the signature play of a contest known as the Hall of Fame game. On an annual tradition that saw this year’s inductees into hockey’s greatest shrine honoured before the game, the ovations for all-time greats Nick Lidstrom and Sergei Fedorov and Chris Pronger ended up being louder than anything afforded the players in uniform for the bulk of the evening.
The quiet is getting common. Playing in an arena yet again splotched with the empty seats of early-rebuild apathy, the Maple Leafs spent most of Friday night doing what they’ve done more than a few times this year. They outshot their opponent — in this case 33-21 in regulation — while playing a disciplined, detail-focused brand of defensively conscious hockey. But for most of the opening 59 minutes, too, they seemed bent on proving Babcock’s impossible-toscore thesis to be true yet again. They looked en route to be shut out for the third time this season.
They avoided that fate with a net-crashing goal by Dion Phaneuf with 1:01remaining in the third period. But then the gulf in skill separating Toronto and Detroit was showcased in a 3-on-3 overtime dominated by the Red Wings, and Detroit’s Jakub Kindl scored midway through the five-minute suddendeath frame to end it, 2-1 visitors.
“It shouldn’t have been like that,” Babcock said of the game winner, chastising the three Toronto skaters on the ice, Jake Gardiner, Tyler Bozak and James van Riemsdyk, for failing to change lines on time. “We had two guys flat-footed and one guy dead tired.”
There were famous faces on hand Friday, most notably a 14-time Stanley Cup champion named Scotty Bowman. Bowman, after spending time chatting with Babcock and Red Wings coach Jeff Blashill — the three are the most recent Detroit coaches — took a few minutes to mull over the state of the game.
Scoring, it should be noted, isn’t just down in Leafs Nation. It’s down league-wide. And Babcock, for one, has suggested that the problem is largely a function of one thing — the fact that goaltenders and their gear keep getting bigger and the net, still four feet by six feet, probably needs to.
“The net’s too small for the size of the goalies. Period,” is how Babcock put it.
Should the league increase its size to increase scoring?
“It’s tough to change history,” Bowman said. “I’ve talked to a few ex-players who were terrific players in their day, and they’re now in the game, and they say it’s pretty hard to score unless you have a perfect shot. But I don’t know . . .”
Bowman, 82, is no fearer of change; as he talked, he occasionally looked down at the watch strapped to his left wrist (manufacturer: Apple Inc) before he offered another take on optimizing the game of his life.
“Maybe on the height, I guess, you could sneak an inch or two. It would probably make a difference,” Bowman said. “But the big goalies, they’re covering a lot of the net.”
There’s a long list of Eastern teams currently enjoying elite-level goaltending. If you sift through the save percentage leaders among goaltenders on pace to play 27 games this season, eight of the NHL’s top 10 reside in Toronto’s conference. Nobody playing for the Leafs is in their class.
“The goaltending in the East — there’s a lot of goalies that can win a game for a team,” Bowman said.
Tell it to the Leafs, who’ve been limited to zero or one goals in seven of their 13 games. On Friday it was Detroit’s Petr Mrazek who turned away 32 of 33 home shots.
So, bigger nets should be on the agenda? Or is all the grousing from Toronto a matter of the Leafs in distress? Bowman glanced down at his Apple watch and offered this: “I would like to see them try it,” he said.
Not in the NHL, mind you. Bowman said he believes the bigger-net experiment should be undertaken at another level of pro hockey, although he acknowledged that it’s probably not fair for the many in- dependent owners in the American Hockey League be constantly asked to be the test-lab guinea pigs for the NHL’s brainwaves.
“I guess you don’t want to monkey around with the game too much,” Bowman said. “If you keep changing, people are going to wonder, ‘Why do they keep changing?’ ”