Laine dominates while Leafs melt down
WINNIPEG— Long before Patrik Laine became the No. 2-overall pick in June’s NHL draft, he’d been displaying many signs of specialness. As a teenaged kid playing among men in the Finnish pro league, he flashed a big-time shot and all-world explosiveness.
And Leo Komarov, the Maple Leafs veteran and fellow Finn, said Laine stood out in another way.
“Usually when young kids come up they don’t really want to talk the way they actually feel in the media. But he pretty much says it straight out,” Komarov said. “It could be good. It could be bad.”
Indeed, by the standards of a lot of sports, Laine’s matter-of-fact self-belief wouldn’t be a big deal. But thanks to hockey’s conservative, conformist devotion to all-for-one humility, Laine’s pre-draft insistence that he ought to be the No. 1 pick — this when it was rightly assumed by most that Toronto was set on Auston Matthews — amounted to a rare bit of brashness in a ocean of blandness.
That ocean, it turns out, is difficult to beat back. As Laine readied to face Matthews for the first time on an NHL rink in Wednesday night’s Jets-Leafs game, his habit for pre-draft straight talk appeared to have been mostly washed from his press-scrum arsenal. A mere few weeks as an NHLer, and already he’s talking just like one. So getting Laine to suggest he was viewing Wednesday’s Leafs-Jets game as a showcase that’d make Maple Leaf fans regret their team picked Matthews — well, even if Laine’s pre-draft attitude suggested that’s exactly how he’d be viewing it, he simply wasn’t going to voice such a thought. Both Laine and Matthews went out of their way before the game to downplay the notion of a budding personal rivalry between them.
And sadly, rightly so.
If a mano-a-mano hate-on ever develops between Matthews and Laine, Wednesday’s 5-4 Jets win in overtime won’t be remembered as its starting point. While Laine scored three goals to key Winnipeg’s remarkable comeback from a 4-0 hole, potting the overtime winner shortly after scoring the goal that tied it with 54 seconds left in regulation, Matthews wasn’t much of a force.
For most of the night, the line Matthews centred alongside William Nylander and Zach Hyman was the team’s worst-performing unit, hemmed in its own end for embarrassingly long stretches. And while Matthews set up Nylander on the pretty power-play goal that gave Toronto a 3-0 lead early in the second period — this after the Leafs were gifted with some eyebrowraising officiating to set up a five-onthree situation — it amounted to a rare individual bright spot in a game that exposed him as a 19-year-old work in progress.
A third-period chant broke out at MTS Centre more than once: “Laine’s better!” On Wednesday night, that was certainly true. When it came to the five-on-five Corsi percentage, a metric to estimate puck possession, Laine registered 56 per cent to Matthews’s dismal 39 per cent. Let’s just say coach Mike Babcock wouldn’t consider that an acceptable outing.
It didn’t get better for Toronto’s No. 34 in overtime. After Matthews was stopped on a breakaway by Winnipeg goaltender Michael Hutchinson, Laine led a rush and beat Frederik Andersen for the game winner.
Still, even if their inaugural meeting was a Toronto-wise dud, the young men taken No. 1 and No. 2 at the 2016 draft will be forever linked. Yes, they play different positions (Matthews is a centre, Laine a winger). And yes, they play in opposing conferences, which will limit them to a couple of annual run-ins barring a scheduling rejig or a move or a future collision to the Stanley Cup final. But draftclass comparisons rarely die. And the Maple Leafs, make no mistake, looked long and hard at Laine before selecting Matthews, Toronto’s eventual choice made easier by the fact that Matthews played centre and the Leafs had long been bereft of a significant one.
“You’re not playing against each other. One’s a winger. One’s a centre. In saying that, you still want to be better than the other guy,” Babcock said on Tuesday. “They all think they’re the best guy. I think that’s important.”
Quietly striving to be the best guy is encouraged. Saying you’re the best guy — not so much.
“It’s a fine line. Hockey’s considered a gentleman’s game, and you have to be confident but not arro- gant,” said Nazem Kadri, the Leafs forward who scored two goals on Wednesday, speaking before the game. “You have to have that swagger . . . on the ice. But off the ice it has to be toned down.”
As much as Laine and Matthews refused to acknowledge any special significance, they both spent time fondly recalling watching the best chapters of the intertwined history of Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin. “That was quite awesome to watch those Penguins-Capitals games,” said Laine, who grew up idolizing Ovechkin. “It would be quite awesome to feel that moment, I think, if we could have that kind of moment today.”
It didn’t happen, mostly because Matthews was largely invisible.
Matthews paid pre-game homage to the key role of a former Winnipeg franchise in the unlikely trajectory of his career. It was the first incarnation of the NHL Jets that moved from Winnipeg to the greater Phoenix area, this in the days before Matthews, who grew up in Scottsdale, Ariz., fell in love with hockey while attending Coyotes games as a youngster.
“If (the Jets) didn’t move down there in 1996-97, or whatever it was, I probably wouldn’t be playing hockey,” he said. “So I guess I was fortunate for that to happen.”
Matthews was hoping to turn Winnipeg’s heartbreak to his benefit again Wednesday, not that he pointed it out. Some things are best unspoken in his sport’s genteel culture.