Blackhawks’ stars give lesson in how to win
Kane has four-point night in leading perennial Cup contenders over Leafs at ACC
Mike Babcock was talking about Chicago’s Joel Quenneville, and about what allows the lifetime coaches to last. Babcock spoke about working hard, reinventing yourself, treating people right, being demanding yet appreciative, and one other thing.
“The other thing, the key to having a long shelf life, is good players,” Babcock said, before the Toronto Maple Leafs lost 4-1 to Quenneville’s Blackhawks, whom Babcock watched beat Montreal on Thursday night. “Don’t kid yourself. Good players make the game a lot of fun. I saw some stuff (Thursday) night that we don’t dare try.
“But we will. But that’s what good players do. Good players create something out of nothing within the structure of the game. And they beat the defensive structure, and you go ‘wow.’ And other players we put out there, and they forecheck and they grind.”
The Leafs have grind by the barrel, but no wow. The Blackhawks are the NHL’s standard: three Stanley Cups in six years, plus a Game 7 overtime loss in the conference finals to the eventual champs. They are skilled, tough, impossible to rattle. They are what Babcock’s Leafs, among others, want to be.
But even if you do everything else right, you can’t do it without the ‘wow’ players. As a smart NHL man puts it, if you get your four or five best players right, you can fill out the rest pretty easily. For Chicago, it’s Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, Marian Hossa, and a rotating fifth. You can do the same thing with the L.A. Kings: Drew Doughty, Anze Kopitar, Jeff Carter, Jonathan Quick when he gets hot, and the last time they won, Marian Gaborik. Even in the NHL, how much does a superstar change the game?
“Unbelievable,” says Babcock. “Because it makes other players better . . . and you learn a ton from him. When I was in Detroit (with defenceman Nicklas Lidstrom), I called them Nick-isms. So you learn by watching ’em, and you add it to the structure of your game.”
Very few can do it every night, of course: Joffrey Lupul thinks Kane and Toews are the two most consistent performers in the league. Friday, Toews drew a second-period penalty, and Kane batted in a goal seconds after it expired. Kane then drew a crosschecking penalty, and scored his league-leading 27th goal on the power play after a cross-ice pass from the next core Blackhawk, Artemi Panarin. Kane zipped it to Panarin for another power-play goal to start the third. Kane got an empty-netter, too. It’s nice to have, talent. “I don’t think our bottom six forwards were near good enough tonight; I thought our top six were very good,” said Babcock. “In the end, they were better than us, that’s all there was to it.”
“There’s always a way to shut down one guy,” said Lupul. “I played a playoff series against (Alexander) Ovechkin, and the focus was just ‘we’ve got to shut down this guy, and the rest of the team comes next.’ Chicago, you can’t do that. You can say, we’ve got to try to stop Patrick Kane, but then Toews and Hossa can beat you.”
“You need stars,” said Babcock. “You need enough of them, you don’t need the most, you need enough, and then you need a lot of foot soldiers with you.”
There just aren’t that many true stars, and the road to getting them is the biggest challenge of Toronto’s attempt, under team president Brendan Shanahan, to build a Cup-contending team. Toronto’s Daniel Winnik, listing gamechanging forwards, doesn’t count many.
“Ovechkin, Kopitar, (Ryan) Getzlaf, (Sidney) Crosby, (Evgeni) Malkin, Toews, Kane, (Tyler) Seguin, (Jamie) Benn, you can throw (Corey) Perry in there,” says Winnik. “I’d throw Jeff Carter in there, too. And (Steven) Stamkos. And I’m not discrediting anybody in the league, but realistically, those are the guys. And what, eight of them play for four teams?”
(He could have added Vladimir Tarasenko, and John Scott, of course. The Coyotes’ King Kong, who was voted an all-star team captain by fans in a bit of fun, was traded to Montreal Friday and is destined for AHL exile. It’s comforting, knowing the league can still find new ways to make itself look silly.)
So who are Toronto’s best internal candidates to be difference-makers? Defenceman Morgan Rielly, who scored Toronto’s lone goal. Maybe even Jake Gardiner. William Nylander, who was lighting up the AHL before his concus- sion at the world juniors. Mitch Marner, though there are those who weren’t impressed with his showing at the world juniors or at Leafs camp last year, even accounting for his age. The Leafs will still need a centre. The best have centres.
No, this team probably needs one more great draft or even better, two, and maybe a Stamkos in the summer, before a contending-calibre core can be collected, and even that’s no guarantee. And that’s why the next few weeks are so important. If this team will decide what it is, as some say the team’s thinking goes, it needs to decide it’s a real seller, because Babcock’s coaching and James Reimer’s goaltending could yet lift them clear of the best lottery odds, where big, brilliant players may await in the top three.
They are grinding, these Leafs. But some more falling might be best.